Clearly languages have common idioms. Lisp just has most of them implemented in terms of very basic idioms. Saying “macros are bad because you can overdo it” is a little silly. Sure: prefer plain old data manipulation over syntax manipulation. But when you actually want syntax manipulation, it’s pretty darn nice.

Equivalent arguments exist for Ruby. Ruby isn’t bad because someone wrote a DSL that should’ve been a method and maybe a hash.