The reason the arrays index from 1 is that Lua is designed to pare down to a data description & configuration language for non-programmers, and they felt that starting arrays from zero would be confusing. I don't like it it either, but in practice it's a minor issue.

People who write off Lua because of indexing from 1, Python because of the significant whitespace, Lisp for its pares, etc. probably haven't gotten to the really interesting stuff yet.