Eval differs very slightly from, say, an interpreter with a very non-syntactic AST, due as you say to homoiconicity. Neither read, print, nor loop differ in any Lisp-specific or qualitative way. And the differences in eval’s behavior don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience (other than that they’re writing Lisp). So what do you mean?

Specifically, cached state and behaviors still need to be reconciled with new inputs/overrides during “eval”, and no Lisp has an easy answer to those (neither, as far as I know, does any other language). Avoidance of closure state via late binding and a convention of reliance on very simple data structures help Lisp’s REPL/hot-patch story, and that is indeed nice, but it’s far from “guaranteed ease/safety of REPL patching” or a totally different paradigm.