The parens made me reluctant to try lisp. Then, 5ish years ago I decided to "just do it", and now they don't bother me at all.

The experience of a beginner is also important though, especially for language adoption, this might be one of the reasons why lisp flavours are not more popular.

I don't even remember when parens stopped being an issue.

I think my hate relationship toward algol syntax was so strong, sexp were an obvious answer from minute 0.

One man's hack is another man's elegance