I paid for a house for myself, and one for my family with lisp, oh and a small cabin in the woods and a couple touring motorcycles. It was clojure specifically. It was precisely the automated reasoning and expert system you say is not the same kind of AI. We did some of that too, but it was peripheral and at most was an input and support for the captured and encoded and refined knowledge of human experts. That project helped pay for many houses and send kids to college, and otherwise help hundreds make a living.

Before that, I did some java and ruby, which was fun and helped pay rent. But before that I helped pay for many houses and even apartment buildings with Common Lisp. That project has paid for houses and school and living for many dozens of people over the last 20 years. It's still going.

I am not interesting in conquering anything, or winning anything, or what momentum or the power law, or economies of scale, or momentum or other efficiencies of industrial software production. People trot out those arguments all the time to explain why something can't be done, or why they can't do what they want to do, or why something they hate is winning or inevitable.

Believe in yourself and your compatriots, and if you wanna do it with lisp, find some better compatriots.

Cheers.