I think there is a crowd, maybe less common than the others, that just want less warts. I can understand that, though I'm not sure the usual dialects that get thrown around are much better.

What I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language. None of them are really functional-style languages; it's just a completely different world.

(Non-scripting languages are a different story, but fundamentally a different use case.)