It failed badly. While it's easy to construct sentences that way, it puts immense cognitive load on the receiver. Probably because you don't have any structure in which to put all these terms thrown at you, we reasoned, so we reversed the order to get structure (connectives) first, followed by the terms.
It wasn't better. Turns out, receiving a structure with a bunch of holes to be filled later also results in high cognitive load.
Why? My guess is that the cognitive load mainly comes from the number of unfinished structural connections. To minimize that, you need to transmit a tree in such a way that the terms come as close as possible to the connective. In other words, not bottom or top first, but "side first".
I believe this is why infix notation is so popular. While you parse "A and B" or "X + Y" you never have more than one open connection. When you parse "(+ X Y)" you have two open connections after reading the "+". Five levels deep that begins to matter a lot.
I like the purist lispy idea of operation-first expressions, but I struggle to make my mind actually work like that. If you like clojure-type threading macros, consider that they do something similar to infix notation: they reduce the number of open structural connections during parsing.
I feel it too, it's a higher context language and I agree that it is probably the fact that you are holding onto more unresolved threads at a time. But perhaps that's just because I didn't grow up with it? I would love to find out.
An interesting observation related to this is that on top of the sentence order differences, things are generally spoken about from the largest concept to the smallest which is different to English as well.
So where we would say "I ate lunch at the park today", in Japanese you might say Today, I at the park ate lunch.
In the second sentence it feels like there is a cliffhanger until we get to the end, the smallest details are often the point of a sentence, and so it's like waiting for the punchline. My brain is on hold until we get there, but in English I must admit I can tune out of a sentence early on and usually get the gist anyway.