Also the material is very dry. If you have never programmed in a Lisp language before it all looks greek and latin. This tends to be a problem with most Lisp books. They very soon go into the great aspects of Lisp.
As a beginner, I need to be shown how to do the regular stuff in Lisp. Like other languages tutorials.
One of the reason I like Python is really for the awesome documentation on their website.
Now the thing about clojure, is due to sheer interest and passion alone. I am being forced to take additional pain to continuously search and learn. Others may not do the same. If the barrier to entry is too high, you will scare away new comers. Especially Lisp new comers.
All Advanced Hackery is OK, but teach me the basic stuff first. I need to learn the if/else, for/do/while , functions, IO, regular expressions, Battery usage, socket etc kind of stuff.
After I'm through with this, you can rant as much about macros as you want, and I'm all ears.
But directly going to all this advanced hackery without me even knowing how to do my day-to-day tasks is what has kept Lisp in the lower side of usage.
It will be sad if clojure goes down this route.