Hacking Inside Out vs Outside In: Lua vs Clojure

I've got a couple of CFT (Copious Free Time) projects going on at the same time:

• My re-architecting/re-writing of my Eldercare home monitoring system (currently in C++11)
• My  Adhoc private VOIP/chat for conferencing project.

I've so far have 2 semi-working (new) implementations for each of these projects.  I  started developing both in a high level programming language (Clojure) and ended up runnng into a few walls that caused me to look at alternative implementation languages (in both cases Lua(JIT)).

With Clojure I got to swing around futures, core.async and rich data structure manipulation, but I hit implementation walls involving libraries (mostly Java) that don't quite do what I want. Soon I was finding myself installing broken, old or incompatible packages.   

Abandoning Clojure, I headed back to LuaJIT. Here I had much more control over my environment, but greatly missed builtin things like futures,  core.async and rich data structure manipulation.

Clojure and LuaJIT represents the opposite ends of the spectrum but they do have the ability to overlap (I can drop down to Java/JNI in Clojure and I can evolve Lisp-like richness out of Lua).

It's bottom up vs top down, or inside out vs outside in.

I need to bite the bullet, pick a direction and stick to it.