You might enjoy Zig then, although it's closer to the Go or C spirit and shares a decent number of the Crystal shortcomings you've mentioned.

It's still pre-1.0 but you might find it interesting, but maybe not for what you're working with right now. https://ziglang.org

I absolutely love Zig, but based on what they praise Crystal for, I don't think they'd enjoy it. Polar opposite syntaxes, do-it-yourself type system, batteries-not-included standard library, and manual memory management? Probably not what they're looking for.

i am intrigued by Zig and have been following it for a while. But i plan on seriously trying it out after the following are availabe; self hosted compiler, http server (or at least a standardized interface) in stdlib and a package manager. Otheriwse the language would not be productive for my needs.