I think you're extrapolating wildly from what PG said. The first, viaweb half of his essay is about the state of affairs in a certain point of time. The second

I think you're extrapolating wildly from what PG said. The first, viaweb half of his essay is about the state of affairs in a certain point of time. The second is about a tendency to underestimate the power of more powerful languages. Neither half said that lisp is beyond the majority. If anything the 'average' programmer has been getting smarter and savvier and more self-directed over time. This is why languages like Perl and Python and Ruby and Scala and now Clojure have had impact.