This is my experience also (10+ years with Clojure). Macros extend the language. I don't need to do that often. I think I've written a dozen macros in ten year

This is my experience also (10+ years with Clojure). Macros extend the language. I don't need to do that often. I think I've written a dozen macros in ten years and deleted all but one of them. My current codebase has two macros, one I wrote and that only supports some repetitive behaviour in a test namespace. Clojure's super-power is solving problems on the JVM and in the browser with one language consisting of well thought out datastructures and a suberb core library of functions that operate on those datastructures. That, and great host interop. And Instaparse, which is a delight!