How big a desire of the average neophyte is to make themselves another language?
In most mainstream languages you have a large syntax, lots of idiosyncracies, and limited ability to hack with the innards of your tool. Scheme is small, regular and freeing.
Now personally, after my first year of college, I asked why on earth can't we access the methods in an object (java4 at the time) to generate a UI to dispatch / interact with it. Teacher rapidly walked me off the room while mumbling "but that would be metaprogramming!". I left confused about his annoyed tone.
Not until year 4 we had the chance to see reflection/intercession, lisps, macros.. I wish someone showed that to me when I was 12.
ps: it might not be obvious, and maybe I'm wrong but I see adhoc DSL's everywhere I work. ORM, build tools, they're all pseudolanguages.. and people keep reinventing them. Scheme/lisp offers it on a silver plater for you.
If you deal with the same problem space a lot, having a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) can let you execute that vocabulary and work at the level of the terms that fit the problem space best.
This is a lot smaller in scope than designing a whole programming language, think of it like a unique vocabulary for solving specific problems and automating specific kinds of work you do!
I've not watched a relative neophyte try and actually -do- that so I can't comment on how far they've got with it, but making "creating DSLs" approachable seems like a really interesting thing to be aiming for.