I agree that the "crazy parentheses" might not be the core reason people who hate Lisp hate Lisp, but it certainly doesn't help advocacy for management types. It's definitely knee-jerk, but lots of people make their decisions in a "blink" and it definitely helps when code looks like "User.find_or_create_by_name(john)". Usually the people who hate lisp, have never done a significant project in it, and never will simply because of the syntax. In a way, it's like trying to learn Korean as an English speaker. Korean is a very modern alphabet based language, but the random strokes in their alphabet would probably make anyone take one look and say "jeez, that looks chinese to me"
Sounds like reaction to Lisp syntax is a good heuristic for choosing managers not to work for.
A good manager will either 1) research more thoroughly and come up with a more sensible reason to not use Lisp (there are many reasons not to use Lisp for many kinds of projects) or 2) delegate technical decisions to the technical people he hired and trusts to make those decisions (with some way to hold them accountable for meeting objectives).
