It often feels like the lisp way is to figure it out yourself, at any cost, and without any external help. For whatever reason the community feels skewed towards egotistical hackers without much sympathy.

I have enjoyed working with CL, and built several large projects in it, but the packaging is a serious pain. At some point you accumulate sufficient knowledge that you can use the different packaging systems, but until then you are essentially sol.

A number one complaint about CL is the lack of libraries, but I think the real issue isn't that the libraries don't exist, but that installing them often isn't worth the effort. C'est la vie, but its still a pity.