> vastly simpler syntax
I've been programming for decades. I've used dozens of different, at times enormously esoteric languages. At one point I built ERPs in a language where operators were abbreviated Russian terms. After just a few years of using Lisp dialects I am absolutely convinced - there's no simpler and more readable syntax than of Lisp's. Anyone who doesn't see that, in my eyes just not made the distinction between familiarity and simplicity.
They're measuring how quickly their eyes can parse something they've already seen a thousand times, and calling that readability. But readability isn't recognition speed - it's the cognitive distance between the code and the computation it describes. And on that measure, Lisp is essentially lossless. There's no syntactic residue. No ceremony the language demands for its own sake. What you write is the structure of the thing, all the way down.
"You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..." I don't look at Matrix feeling puzzled anymore. I see the truth.
People who bounce off the parentheses are reacting to something real: it doesn't look like what they already know. But that's not the language failing them. That's just the last bit of the old syntax dying. Give it a few months of structural editing and a proper REPL workflow, and you won't see parentheses anymore - you'll see shape. You'll see depth. And going back to anything else will feel like someone handed you a map drawn in crayon and called it a feature.