> they need to understand that there's another dimension to criticisms of Lisp that aren't just "I don't like parentheses" and that there is substantive feedback to be gleaned.

I'm also somewhat reminded of the decline of Perl and how some people who love and still frequently use Perl don't really seem to even acknowledge the complaints people have about it, which seems to prove the claim about the decline being cultural. According to that kind of attitude, the lack of popularity is inexplicable, and we might actually be lucky that they're not resorting to conspiracy theories to "explain" the mismatch between their preferences and observable reality.

The Haskell motto of "avoid success at all costs" seems a lot healthier, as in, they know they might need to choose between going mainstream and getting to keep a language that suits them personally.

Lots of the Lisp advocacy also comes off as either entirely too vague, like this blog post, or stuck in the age of the `worse-is-better` talk (1989, so predates WWW and nearly all the programming languages in widespread general use). I don't care about comparisons to C, because the only places C is seriously considered for new projects these days are in places where a GC is unacceptable (and purposes Rust isn't certified for or whatever).