Hmm, this just gave me an idea: Visual Studio Code Common Lisp plugin might also be a good way to expose the language to people unfamiliar to the language.
Every time I tried to get into CL, having to use Emacs/SLIME (which, let's face it, is the development environment for it for all practical purposes) has been a huge turn-off.
So, yes. Please?
I had (and still have) a similar aversion to emacs, so I used to use Sublime with SublimeREPL plugin, which allowed me to run Common Lisp and Clojure (or any other language with a REPL) inside the editor. Pretty much a makeshift IDE, with an interface you're already used to. I've since moved on to VSCode, and I bet there must already be a way to replicate this in it, I just haven't had the need to work with Lisp since to explore this.
It would be a very good idea. Be sure to make it talk to swank (the server side of the current editor tooling) so you can benefit from all the work that has been done there