I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think it's important not to conflate the concepts of Lisp's ease of reading/writing arbitrary data and Lisp's ability to read/write programs using the same facilities.

Using Lisp to read and write a configuration file means you don't need to worry about lexing and parsing either. If you don't use Lisp, or if you don't use S-expressions, you will need to lex and parse the configuration file just to read it, compiler or no compiler.

Depending what domain you program in, a Lisp programmer may not ever need to think about lexing and parsing. I tried a little googling to make sure I was remembering their definitions right and actually didn't come up with anything. From memory, lexing is splitting the input stream up into tokens, and parsing is structuring those tokens into a parse tree. If I'm remembering wrong, re-read the prior paragraph temporarily using those definitions and it will make sense.