Right. He's not saying, "macros are bad", he's saying, "macros often lead to code that's very hard to maintain, and in the end many are more trouble than they're worth". You can still do very powerful things without them in most cases; as far as I recall, SICP has no macros.
Code conventions go a long way, though - with-* macros are easily understood, for example.
Code conventions go a long way, though - with-* macros are easily understood, for example.