Is there anywhere that one can read about such cases? Would be interesting to read about both how well they are doing and what sort of apps they use Lisp for making.
Also, aren't there any other OSS or free Lisp IDEs outside of Emacs? Or are they all crap?
Really for a good experience you just need something with Swank support and ability to highlight matching parens. Eclipse would even work, though I haven't tried any of the plugins for it. IDE features like introspecting values, breakpoints, tracing, profiling, stepping, recompiling are all part of the Common Lisp standard so you'll get them for free just by running the Lisp REPL in a terminal. What you use on top of that is really just making it more convenient to interact with the Lisp environment than typing everything in by hand. I like slimv with its auto-paren-infer stuff turned off (matching and rainbow parens are fine for me) but I've also just used a tool that uses two screen sessions to send data back and forth without using Swank (or even Lisp, I use it sometimes for Python but that's trickier because I can't just send a class to (re)define if I have newlines between methods and I can't casually change my namespace).
And [Portacle](https://shinmera.github.io/portacle/) is an Emacs shipped with SBCL, Slime and Git in a portable and multiplatform way, so it's straightforward to begin with.
Just grab the latest release from https://github.com/slime/slime/releases Install atom-slime and sbcl (something like brew install sbcl on osx) Point atom to the directory you extracted slime to and then hit packages > slime > start
Many hobbyists and professionals use Lisp to solve their problems and make money.
IDEs are in a sorry state. If you're an Emacs user, you'll be happy. Otherwise, unless you spend hundreds of dollars for a professional IDE, you won't have much. Editing Lisp requires a good IDE.