Right, it's hard to disconnect some of Clojure's niceties from the macro work (though I think Clojure's macros tend to do less inner inspection than macros you'll see in other lisp variants)
The link to Rhombus is very interested, I hadn't heard of this and it looks very well developed. Will mess around with it.
If you're interested in funding this work, or helping with the designs, please reach out. In the meantime, make sure you check out Rhombus. https://rhombus-lang.org/