A more useful exercise is to consider the factors that go into people choosing a language in the first place. I don't think people usually think hard about how powerful or elegant the language is, at least when they're starting out, rather they pick it up when they need to solve a specific problem. For example, here's how I ended up using the languages I've learned in the past:
QBASIC - Because I wanted to make video games when I was a kid, and things like functions and classes and scopes confused 10 year old me. The idea of executing a sequence of commands was simple enough to grasp.
C - Because that's what all the "real" programmers used, and I had reached the limits of what I could do with basic.
VB - Because writing a GUI in C sucks.
Perl - Because that's just what you used for web pages at the time.
Java - Because of college.
C# - Because VB was pretty lame.
Python - Because I needed something better to write small programs in, and the entirety of perl would regularly fall out of my head because it's too complex.
F# - Because C#'s verbosity gets on my nerves and everyone was all up on functional programming; but I found the library support in most other functional languages lacking.
Ruby - Because it's kind of the lingua franca of web startups at the moment.
And on and on. I'd say about half the languages up there are actually pretty awful, and none of them are as good as LISP, but they did something specifically useful for me at the time I learned them. I can't really say that about LISP, because LISP doesn't really have a niche. The reason I ended up learning LISP (Clojure specifically) was because I wanted to be a better programmer, but I don't think that's really a strong enough argument for it if people want it to "win"