That's a fair point.

For a programmer without Lisp experience, that would be true. But I've written enough Lisp-based webapps that there aren't really that many 'unforseen' problems for me anymore (rule of thumb: use software by Edi Weitz - everything he writes is golden :-D)).

That being said, I still ran into trouble with Elephant, so I probably should have taken these sort of 'unknown unknowns' (which are more prevalent in unusual languages like Lisp) into consideration upfront. To not do so was certainly an oversight.