I agree it _sounds_ like an armchair critic, but I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they had a bad experience involving Lisp?

The actively hostile to collaborative programming seems particularly misguided. Even an extreme case like the code from hu.dwim, which is written in practically a new language they built on top of CL and has barely any documentation is still fairly easy to understand.

Yeah, and the other thing is that the macrostep expander in slime makes it fairly straightforward to understand how an unfamiliar macro works: you just expand it a couple steps and see how its mapping the surface syntax to utilities you know. In fact, I often find function calls harder to grok now than custom macros :)