Actually, it was a bunch of people who thought that the rest of us were not competent enough to use them without shooting ourselves in the foot, head, or other

Actually, it was a bunch of people who thought that the rest of us were not competent enough to use them without shooting ourselves in the foot, head, or other parts of our anatomy. (James Gosling are you listening?) I used macros to great effect to create constant data structures for such things as keyword tables in parsers. The art of programming has advanced a long ways since the early days of C. I think the badness of macros is more a function of those times than inherent problems with macros themselves.