I can understand your doubt. After writing a decent amount of Lua I really started to notice it lacking succinct ways to express things that I've become used to in other languages.

So I wrote the language for myself to use, but I've opened it up for other people because I think there is some potential for it. The use case for MoonScript is the same as the use case for Lua.

Also I have done a lot of mitigate the pains of compiling and debugging. It's actually pretty seamless, I've done stuff like automatic code compilation on require, and error line number rewriting. I urge you to check out the documentation: <http://moonscript.org/reference/#moonscript_api>;