You're making the same argument for why MIT started teaching Python instead of Scheme. I feel sorry for anyone whose life as a programmer is library spelunking instead of solving new problems.
If you think libraries are more important than having a truly interactive development environment that is Lisp 100% of the way down, you are missing out hugely on power and expressiveness. It has to be experienced to be understood. You're only fooling yourself and other people by thinking that Clojure is a "good enough" Lisp.
> I feel sorry for anyone whose life as a programmer is library spelunking instead of solving new problems.
You do realize that the vast majority of all the things that need to be done are essentially "library spelunking"? Not every programmer can spend his time doing AI research. A lot of the things that need to be done are "easy" but very work-intensive, and can be made much, much faster by good libraries. The majority of programming jobs are still essentially crud apps with a db backend, and CL is simply just a bad language to implement those in.
> If you think libraries are more important than having a truly interactive development environment that is Lisp 100% of the way down, you are missing out hugely on power and expressiveness. It has to be experienced to be understood.
I have experienced it, and understood it. And after 6 years of it, I switched to Java, because that's actually a more productive language to get things done in. Because even if the language itself is shit, things like internationalization and input validation have good libraries so I don't have to spend weeks working on getting all the little details right. Clojure buys me that, and a better language.
Clojure may not be a good enough lisp, but it's certainly better than CL.
If you think libraries are more important than having a truly interactive development environment that is Lisp 100% of the way down, you are missing out hugely on power and expressiveness. It has to be experienced to be understood. You're only fooling yourself and other people by thinking that Clojure is a "good enough" Lisp.