OMG, the "improved" example is so cluttered and far far far less readable -- and even foreign -- to someone like me that has developed using lisp professionally for at least 10 years.
That's a crazy effect. For me, as someone who has a very minimal understanding of Lisp (apart from messing with it in Emacs for at most an hour), the improved version is much more readable.
Do you mean readable, as in it is easier for you to match "." to "," than ( to ), or is it just easier to look at without reading because there is less there.
The latter. Maybe it's different in Lisp, but whenever I read code, I rarely care about the exact order of operations, just which ones are actually being executed. In that regard, the improved version allowed me to comprehend the gist of what was happening much faster than the regular version did. For a few seconds, before even attempting to start comprehending the actual operations being executed, my eyes were stuck trying to comprehend the parentheses.