[astine]

    intermingling the actual Clojure keywords (there's only ~17 of them) with the convenience macros and functions built up from those two primitives.

It sounds like you are drawing a distinction between the core Clojure language and the macros and functions in the core Clojure namespace. This is not really a valid distinction. That's the thing about Lisps, that much of the language is implemented in the language itself. Macros make the language easier to extend by both the language designer and random developers and users in appropriate cases. You can keep special forms to a minimum. Those those functions and macros are considered part of the core language even if they aren't special forms.