[DanWeinreb]

At the International Lisp Conference last year, I put in an evening event called the "Great Macro Debate", in which these issues were discussed. (We encouraged humor, and flaming as long as it was witty, so it was a lot of fun.) What you say is true to an extent. Macros, like most things, can be abused. If you have a group of Lisp programmers, one thing you can do is have the junior ones request advice from the senior ones about what constitutes "tasteful and idiomatic" use of macros, and vet particular macros, since it is rather hard to crisply "pin down" just what those things mean.