Why is the macro systems in lisps considered so valuable

In general, I don’t recommend assessing programming language features in isolation; how they play together is much more important. In particular, I think the story behind Clojure macros is incomplete until you consider how they relate to syntax. I tried to describe this story here: http://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2018-01-06-so-yeah-about-clojures-syntax.html

It’s totally normal that you would not need to write a macro as an application developer; that’s more for library authors. The benefit is usually not to help you express one particular aspect of your domain logic; rather, it’s to eliminate accidental concerns in your code, and at the ecosystem level to make a lot of powerful tools available to you at a low cost.

2 Likes