I think this conceptual disconnect can happen even without a DSL. So, then you have the huge amount of code, plus, a bunch of new and confusing concepts applied

I think this conceptual disconnect can happen even without a DSL. So, then you have the huge amount of code, plus, a bunch of new and confusing concepts applied in ways that don't fit with your understanding of those concepts. A DSL may mean that the language doesn't fit how you think about a given problem, sure, but a poorly fitting abstraction can happen with or without those language abilities. I tend to think that having those poorly fitting abstractions expressed in a compact form is probably better than having them expressed in libraries with very large surface area and oddly connecting/dependent parts. Now, I don't actually know this to be true; my experience with Lisp projects is very limited. I have worked with Perl and Tcl that made use of higher level capabilities of those languages to create little DSLs for specific tasks, and I didn't find it problematic; but neither is as far along as Lisp on the DSL spectrum. But, I have also worked with big projects in languages like PHP that get the abstractions very wrong (at least, wrong from my perspective), and have found the verbosity to be exhausting...saying so much in order to accomplish so little (and to do it wrongly) seems even worse than tiny amounts of code that don't fit my mental model.