Yes, you can, but re-read the original comment: the implication was "how can it be beautiful with all those parentheses?" It seems clear that two different aspects of beauty were conflated.
> …what is it about the "beauty" of Lisp that the HN community seems to like so much? … the number of parentheses is just mind boggling. I want to understand why it is so loved.
Also, I would love to hear which language(s) has a more flexible syntax than Lisp, seeing as expressiveness is one of Lisp's strong points.
> 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.
What does "surrender the issue of syntax" mean?
In any case, citation needed for this one. "Easy" and "hard" are very strongly dependent on familiarity. This human finds them easy enough to parse.
> 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.
Reducing parentheses is not really a strong selling point for someone familiar with Lisp, because Lisp programmers don't really work with parentheses like in other languages (again, they're managed).
It's not that they're liked for their own sake, but they enable many advantages (such as homoiconicity, structural editing, easy, selective evaluation of expressions at any level of nesting, and so on).
That being said, in Clojure, I often prefer to pipe functions like you mentioned when it seems like the expression would end up unnecessarily nested otherwise:
(-> 8 inc str vector)
;; => ["9"]