> But if you learned, say, Python in school, the list comes back to "macros, which you really shouldn't make much use of in the more modern understanding, and a bigger focus on recursion". Less likely to make you pass out in awe.

It really depends which Lisp you are talking about.

If this is true then why do I find Clojure so many orders of magnitude more powerful, more reasonable and more pragmatic than Python. I've done Python for a decade, but now days I would choose Clojure over it every single time.

Clojure over Python is so very much more than just macros. The default data structures are far superior, the time abstractions are fantastic, the concurrent and parallel programming features are better, the asynchronous support is miles ahead and it has parts you can use that just don't exist at all in Python like core.logic and core.match.

I also think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, a lot of this stuff exists in Python, but not in the same elegant and idomatic way. In Python the onus is on you to get it right. And one rarely does. Clojure however steers you in the right direction, making it idomatic. When your code is right, it looks right. And when your code is wrong, it looks wrong.