[ken]

> and thus symptomatic of a culture more preoccupied with doing things the computationally interesting way rather than the more powerful way, e.g., using recursion when a for-loop would be shorter and faster

That would indeed be a strange culture, but it's not the Lisp culture. We use loops.

In fact, most (all?) of our looping constructs are implemented as macros. Try implementing a looping construct (or any other macro in CL) without macros; I bet you'll find it shorter and faster to use a macro than a function.