[Mikera]

Agree with everything you say, but it is worth noting that the insights you get from static analysis on desugared forms (which can be very large and complex!) is much harder to interpret than static analysis on the original forms.

So to make static analysis tools useful on macros, they really need some way to map back to the original source forms. Not all tools do this (either at all, or well) - and to the extent that they don't it is an big impediment for static analysis.

Also the killer challenge: macro expansion in Clojure can depend on a mutable environment at the time of macro expansion. This makes it impossible to do reliable static analysis, unless you are able to recreate the runtime environment at the time of macro expansion in your static analysis tool, which is hard/impossible in general.

This is part of the motivation for my little Kiss language experiment: with immutable environments you can keep the power of macros, but avoid the mutable environment problem. Ideally, macro expansion would be governed only by things that are provably compile-time constants (not sure how feasible this is while maintaining the dynamic flexibility of Clojure that we all love... but it's an attractive idea at least).