Before embarking on my programming career, I went through HtDP while I still had time to do stuff like that. So I got a bit of grounding in Scheme. Regardless, when I discovered Ruby, I jumped on it and to this day I prefer to use it over any flavor of Lisp. In the end, I really think it comes down to syntax. I much prefer a normal, imperative kind of workflow. You lose a little bit of power and flexibility over Lisp but the friendliness of having verbs, nouns and diverse semantics wins out over what feels like a monotonous landscape. As you say, the underlying language semantics are largely similar, expressivity is just very similar. So the only thing left is syntax, and when you talk about syntax, you're talking about the most aesthetic part of the language, the part that's hardest to describe and reason about.