I think that's an astute observation that the history of IF languages seems to be trying to find a balance between easy for programmers on one side and easy for writes on the other, and that Lisp is certainly as intertwined in the early history of IF as it is because it naturally hits an interesting place in that balance given the S-Expression "code is data"/"data is code" simplicity.

I still find Inform 7 a deeply fascinating example simply for trying a "Prose is code" approach that tries to favor writers first, somewhat at the expense of sometimes making programmers frustrated.