"The first substantial barrier is Emacs. Before learning Lisp, first you must learn Emacs. I've tried several times, but keep deciding it's not worth the effort."
First of all, I don't think it's accurate to say that you must learn Emacs before learning Lisp. Other editors such as vi or IDEs such as ACL & LispWorks are used successfully.
On the other hand, after using IDEs for over a decade, I switched to vim for a couple of years and more recently switched to Emacs. Get the "Learning GNU Emacs" book and it will be trivial to pick up Emacs.
