The thing about revising a standard is that it's a social task and not a technical one, and the cost of getting everybody on board is accommodating differing op

The thing about revising a standard is that it's a social task and not a technical one, and the cost of getting everybody on board is accommodating differing opinions. See the sibling about nil vs '() vs #f. All this is to say, if you want to get the CL hackers on board, you need to meet their needs, at least partially, in addition to cleaning out the cruft; and your cruft might be the hill that I choose to die on. I've got a PDF somewhere of Richard Gabriel's notes on the history of Lisp; it sheds interesting (if opinionated) light on the evolution of Common Lisp.