The thing is, lispers don't want more syntax. They've rejected Dylan, sweet-expressions, and a million other experiments. There's a sizable contingent who complain about Clojure using [] instead of all ().

So really all you are talking about is making a nice syntax that enables macros, and that doesn't require lisp. See Elixir.

If lispers aren't going to adopt extra syntax, your only hope is to attract non-lispers, and then you've got the issue where your lispy language has to be better than existing languages at doing something, and that's hard.

Why go to so much trouble for something that's been rejected repeatedly? Macros don't require lisp syntax and that's the main advantage.

My own ghetto transpiler converts this:

    sum = reduce partial(+)
    [1, 2, 3] sum + 1 println

into this:

    (def sum (partial reduce +)) 
    (println (+ 1 (sum [1 2 3])))

https://github.com/aaron-lebo/prose

It's fun to think about, but not sure the general concept has an audience.

edit:

Bob Nystrom's lark is one of the cooler non-lispy lisps out there:

https://github.com/munificent/lark