[lonjil]

> Yet, it appears the median and mean Lisp programmer is producing Yet Another (TM) test framework, anaphoric macro library, utility library, syntactic quirk, or half-baked binding library to scratch an itch. Our Lisp programming environments are less than what they were in the 80s because everybody feels the current situation with SLIME and Emacs is good enough.

I don't think this is true. Not anywhere close. Most such examples are small, and probably only took a small number of hours to produce. While "superlative" stuff takes very many man hours to create. So just by seeing that there are many throwaway testing frameworks or whatever, you cannot tell where most of the work hours actually go. A half baked binding library takes 20 minutes to make, while a proper high quality rendering engine takes hundreds if not thousands of hours.

The Lisp population is thin on people making cool shit because the Lisp population in general is thin.