My idiot instructor for comparative programming languages set me back years in understanding the cool parts of Lisp. He focused on "List Processing", which seemed pointless to me because lots of languages have lists... (I work with him now, so I'm allowed to call him an idiot)
You seem to think it's about the function calls. Maybe you had a bad instructor too, and he focused on "functional programming", which is all the rage for the last decade. I dunno, maybe you came to that conclusion on your own.
The thing I now think is wonderful about Lisp (Scheme for me), is that you can write your program however you want. If you want to use switch statements, and your language doesn't have one (Python), just make your own:
(switch foo
(case bar -> (do whatever you want))
(case hmm -> (do something else)))
(backtrack
(keep trying)
(different things)
(until it works))
You want to have a switch instruction? A quick macro, done. You want to have a Prolog-level pattern matching? A few macros, done (or use optima library). Want Perl-like convenient string manglings with regexps? A few reader macros + CL-PPCRE (arguably the fastests implementation of Perl-compatible regexes in existence) and again, you're done.
I think you're seriously projecting the limits of more constrained languages onto Lisp.
There are also special forms and macros.
> not how many functions you define
I've never seen anyone argue that this is what makes lisp good.
If only programming problems could be solved by lots of functions calls!! The truth is the difficulty exists in the solving of problems, not how many functions you define. If someone thinks you re-invented Lisp at some point, then either they do not understand the problem or they fail to understand the solution.. or of course; they do not care what you have written and instead think you have not used enough parenthesis.