[cle]

I agree that the former is more elegant in that the syntax is helping more.

But LISPers prefer the latter, because its elegance is that it's a single expression, and the same sort of expression as everything else. Which makes it easier to extend, compose, manipulate, etc. That's the tradeoff of LISP's syntax--you get extreme flexibility and customizability, at the expense of being constrained by its syntactic simplicity.