I personally think the "code as data" concept is not so important in lisp. It is critical to writing macros, but you often don't write macros and beginners to lisp often abuse macros.

I've written Clojure professionally now for a couple years and am pretty fast and proficient at it, but when I write a function call, I don't think of it as a list, even though that is what it is. I don't think any lisper does. It's just a function with arguments and I'm writing in the syntax necessary, which happens to be a list.

In those rare occasions where I think a macro is necessary, sure, it helps that a function call is a list, but that's hardly the main role in a day's work.