> The way lisp languages are pitched here, I thought I was in for a mind opening experience

Have you used a Lisp with a connected REPL? Not the one that you have to type instructions into - the one that allows you to send any expression at point, with virtually zero ceremony to it, basically letting you evaluate any part of the program on the fly? And that REPL can be even remote - at work we use one running in a kubernetes cluster, we can change our APIs and experiment without not only redeploying things, we don't even have to save our changes. Can you imagine being able to try your code without saving, linting, linking, compiling, deploying - all that on the fly? It is truly mind-opening experience. It's so fucking nice, it's like playing a video game. I do understand why it's appealing to build actual video games that way.

Using a Lisp without structural editing tools and without a REPL is like having a Ferrari without a working engine - you'd have to pedal it to move around, it's ridiculous.