CL is designed so that code written for earlier Lisp dialects can run with little or no modification, which means there's a lot of bloat and historical baggage

CL is designed so that code written for earlier Lisp dialects can run with little or no modification, which means there's a lot of bloat and historical baggage in the core `common-lisp` package. But even if that weren't the case, you'd still need conventions like you do in any other language. Clojure is a young language with a BDFL. It already has historical baggage that prominent members of the community will tell you to avoid. The fact that so many people write their own cleaned-up wrapper libraries like CLUEL isn't a sign that CL especially needs them; it just means it's easy to do. If a language doesn't have macros and doesn't let you shadow built-in operators, you have to play the hand you're dealt. It's trivial to deal with cryptic function names and inconsistent parameter ordering in a language's core library. I can read code with `car` and `cdr`; I write code with `first` and `rest`. What makes a poorly designed language is something you can't paper over, like broken lexical scoping. There are definitely some things worth complaining about in CL as a language, but I didn't see any in this post.