Some academics say that sexp allow to focus on what's important: semantics. I kinda agree with that, so many time, effort is wasted on syntax that moves, and only make ideas further apart.
Well, right, but we are not talking about an academic paper here, we talk about practically convenient language. If syntax is unimportant, we could leave Nix files as is -- semantically, it is a good programming language. But judging from the comments, I am not the only one who thinks that syntax and overall esthetics are important.