>> There've been so many attempts at removing the parentheses from Lisp, to make it look more like C...
I think it's less about looking like C (or other) it's about looking like normal Math: (f 1) vs f(1). The above plugin solves this. Maybe the neoteric feature is the most important of the three extensions.
But then again `unnecessary` braces are nothing to torture malleable newcomers with, they are just a thing to get rid of.
There've been so many attempts, of various stated motivations. Many of them have been expressly to make it more familiar to programmers (not mathematicians). Which, for all of the time I've been in Lisps, has meant the series of languages that mimicked the syntax of the language before, for the same familiarity/acceptance reason: C, then C++, then Java, then JavaScript. There's also been the indentation-sensitive ones that are influenced by Python. And the math ones.
But then again `unnecessary` braces are nothing to torture malleable newcomers with, they are just a thing to get rid of.