> So what are macros? All they are is read packaged up nicely into formal system.

Macroexpansion happens during a different phase altogether, and would work exactly the same even if programmers had no access to the reader at all. The reader transforms an unstructured character stream into structured data, while macroexpansion transforms already-structured data into different structured data. (Read-macros are another story, but it's clear they're not what the author had in mind.)

Too often these kinds of posts only add to the confusion they're attempting to clear up.