I'm not sure this is a great presumption. Someone can be familiar with lisps, understand the design choices involved, even deeply appretiate the beauty of the resulting language, while still prefering languages with a more flexible syntax
> This is what people refer to when they mean that "the brackets disappear after a while." You're not focusing on them; they're handled by something else.
This is exactly the problem. Lisps surrender the issue of syntax completely to the interpreter/compiler, which makes it easy for a machine to parse, but harder for a human. I personally prefer syntax to be designed for humans to read and write, because its going to be translated to something different to be executed anyway.
Now, the simplicity of the lisp syntax is of course intimately connected to the homoiconicity of the language and the extremely powerful macros, so I do understand the value of it and the tradeoffs involved. (Although I find it slightly ironic how it's venerated, given that the original lisp actually had two syntaxes, M-expressions for the human to manipulate and S-expressions for the machine to manipulate).
I personally prefer to do my "meta-programming" in the type-system and have flexible syntax to express functions in different ways relevant to the uses of the language. That can be Elm with it's simple type system and elegant operators for application (|> and <|) and composition (>> and <<) which indicate direction, or it can be Agda with it's unicode syntax and custom mixfix operators, where you can define a if-then-else as a function as "if_then_else_ : (b : Bool) -> (x : a) -> (y : a) -> a" and call it "if <b> then <x> else <y>". I find that the way these languages use operators, reduces the need for parenthesis and allows you to express what your code is doing, whether it's a pipeline of functions or some imperative-like steps being done in order. The result is a syntax that I find clearer.
I am however, well aware that a lot of people dislike Haskell's use of operators and that these languages are a minority in terms of usage indicating that my preference might not be common, but I don't necessarily presume that it's because they don't understand Haskell.