[kazinator]

I'd have to say that a ham-fisted read-time solution which throws important backquote identities under the bus is worse than just coding carefully under the threat of unhygienic macros, and worse than the complexity of hygienic macros.

[patrec]

What concrete problem do you see with it? [edit: BTW you can quite easily implement common-lisp style backquote in clojure as a macro, because just like scheme clojure does not share common lisp's defect of baking unquoting into the readtable dispatch of backquote; i.e. unquotes outside of backquotes are syntactically valid; '~x -> (unquote x)]