The Lisp process to which the author refers is not as stately and merit-based as he implies. In Scheme, the r6rs process was very difficult and divisive, and many people voted in favor of it while very publicly holding their noses. The r7rs process, if carried out as planned, will attempt to avoid the same kind of damage and will result in two language: a sparse core language and a featureful "practical" language. That larger more featureful language will be the one that is more useful outside of language research, and it is also the one that will change more over time, shielding the core language from the need to change. Scheme purists can stick with the core. Non-purists can embrace the featureful languages such as r7rs-plus (or whatever it will be called), Racket, and Clojure. Anointing CL or Scheme (core) as the final arbiter of the value of a language feature is tantamount (bucket list item #73: use "tantamount" in a sentence; check) is OK if it works for you, but it certainly wouldn't work for a lot of working programmers.