Things written for public consumption from the outset are cleaner.
> The Common Lisp ecosystem lacks a certain "go-getter" philosophy, needed to forge through "boring" work, that some other language ecosystems seem to have.
"Boring" work that creates something actually useful almost always happens in the crucible of real, pressing problems. Hobby projects tend to focus on what's fun or interesting. People don't want to take the time to bring something the rest of the way into "useful" territory if they don't actually need to use it for some purpose
On the job code, whether lisp or not lisp... I'm more used to managers preventing writing anything more complete or documented, except for once in few months forcing everyone to write BS low-quality docs because "documentation" is a line item on the contract.
My pleas to set aside time to document and polish things are usually ignored, my pleas for a technical writer on staff to help us keep docs current and well written have never been listened to so far.
We're both speaking from limited sets of experiences, and neither is likely to be representative of the whole industry
Of course there's also a chicken-and-egg element