I feel its wrong for me to push this without at least mentioning that one of my professors wrote Dr. Scheme :-/
The thing with Emacs is that I feel like I am missing out on the full potential of developing in CL if I'm not using it. How true is that?
I don't think it has to be true, though they do go together well. Not all CL hackers use Emacs. You might consider trying the Lispworks IDE, or the Allegro IDE (on Windows) or the Clozure IDE (on Mac).