Agreed. People give a lot of hate to FORMAT and LOOP, but I think with both of them for the domains they're working in, it's kind of a natural progression of the evolution of a DSL (which as you said is very lispy since reader macros are one of the biggest strengths of CL) that you'll end up with something like FORMAT or LOOP that handles a lot of common use cases for string formatting or iteration as tersely as possible. It's inherently less flexible than pure s-exps (nothing is as flexible), but IME solves most problems where you need string formatting or iteration. Plus it's part of the ANSI CL spec, and sticking as close to the spec as possible and being conservative with external dependencies is usually a good thing in CL.
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