Apart from your rant, this is the most pertinent part of what you said:
> There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages
And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL in a homoiconic language. Homoiconicity has nothing to do with a REPL or tools.
I do however think SBCL has a very nice environment with great tools (especially it's compiler) and that's why I've used it a lot over the years, but I really think you underestimate the environments in other languages (including the "holistic, overall experience").
> And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL
You are wrong. You might be correct about the workflow but still wrong about the semantics. Pedantically, your notion is false, because homoiconism gives the REPL a genuine capability (program-as-manipulable-data across the read/eval boundary) that non-homoiconic REPLs lack.
Can you parse code into an in-memory representation and can you eval?
If yes, then you can do everything that Lisp repls can.
The parser being slightly more complex than parsing s-expressions doesn't materially change anything.
I did not say anything about s-expressions. I said "homoiconicity". S-expressions are not an absolute requirement for homoiconic features. You keep poking me with your "knowledge" as if I'm trying to sell you snake oil and you feel obligated to defend and retaliate. I don't need to prove anything to you, I'm not your ignorant professor attempting to instil you with some defunct truths that exist solely in my head. Do your own research. Or don't, who cares.