As a user that is annoyed but some of the things you mention. Will I require to learn Common Lisp to use project-mage?
What's more, if you have good GUI capabilities (which Mage will have), you could build visual user interfaces for configuration (I don't plan to make such UIs btw, but someone with a good-enough UI sense and interest in this stuff could attempt it at some point, I guess).
If all you do is stick to some distro with some visual config tool, then you won't even have to know it's common lisp (unless some error is signalled and the interactive debugger pops up).