I have read the point about hygienic macros before. I have been working with racket and common lisp and I cannot tell you have annoying it is to be trying to learn macros and continually having to fight racket to let me do what I want. CL on the other hand seems to get out of the way and let me shoot myself in the foot just fine. I'd say that from a learning standpoint hygienic macros (ala define-syntax) are a roadblock because they introduce a whole bunch of hidden state which is hard to build a mental model of until after you have encountered regular macros.