Programming language syntax matters. It's the interface in which the programmer writes the code, synthetic sugar can reduce the "mental overload" of a feature.
For example, in C, the array operator is mostly synthetic sugar for pointer addition, and could be removed. Should it be removed? Of course not, cause programmers are not thinking of pointer arithmetic when indexing an array.
And as much as I love lisp, it's one of the top reasons none of them ever had widespread adaption. Nobody likes having to do math like this (* (+ (sqrt 4) 2) 4).
There's a lot of advantages to having the Lisp syntax, especially with code navigation and editing. I personally much prefer it.
And because of easy macros (another advantage of the syntax), you can easily add syntactic sugar as you see fit where you care.
Admittedly I don't think anyone really prefers the second way of writing it, but that's not the same as being ecstatic over the first one.