> Most (but not all) people who have used lisp for significant projects find that they either like the parens or are simply neutral about them.

There's a substantial selection bias there in that people who have strongly negative feelings about parens have plenty of opportunities in the field to work with languages without them, so the only people likely to put up with them on significant projects are ones who feel positively, neutrally, or perhaps only weakly negatively about the feature from the start.

That said, I do think the complaints about that particular feature are overblown, much the way those about Python's particular whitespace handling are.