Gahd, that was a fun read. I'd love to hear about your experiences with SBCL[1]. I've been porting my app over to it for the last 24 hours, lazily taking arc functions/macros as I go. My approach so far is to put up with &rest, extra parens in let, explicit destructuring-bind[2], etc.
[1] Perhaps offline; email in my profile; did you know the email field itself is not public?
[2] I wrote a bind macro variant a few years ago (http://akkartik.name/lisp.html), I may start using that. Still a little more verbose. Hmm, if I eliminate multiple-value-bind I can get rid of :db..
