[netsettler]

It is expressly not the goal of CL to be all things to all people, and yet to be many things to many people. Scheme has a kind of fixed set of things it definitely wants to be and sacrifices others, it just does it in a different shape so that the particular examples you pick are easy.

One way I sometimes conceive it is that in any given language there are a certain number of small expressions and a certain number of large ones. Differences in semantics don't make things non-computable (which is why turing equivalance is boring) but they change which expressions will be easily reachable. There are certain things Scheme wants to be able to say in not many characters and different things CL does. Neither is a flawed design. But they satisfy different needs. It's possible to dive into either and be fine. As others have pointed out here, it's not as big a deal in practice as it seems like in theory. What matters in practice is to have an intelligible and usable design, which both languages do. But to assume that the optimal way to say something in one language should stay constant even if you change the syntax and semantics of the language is to not understand why you would want to change the syntax and semantics of the language.