Another helpful comparison is Lisp syntax versus Forth syntax. If you actually want a simple, terse, unstructured language, Forth is the way to do it: Words will consume and return any number of inputs or outputs to the stack, and you get entire classes of error when it's unbalanced that would surface as syntax errors anywhere else.
Just adding s-expressions is actually a huge jump up in syntactic complexity and structure, since now you can define a whole hierarchy statically, "on the page", instead of having to use a series of stack operations to manipulate memory from afar. And then as you lucidly put it, going from s-expressions to a practical Lisp dialect adds another level of context on top of that.
(And yeah, it's possible to bolt structure onto a Forth dialect, too, but the "Chuck Moore way" is that you do that custom every time you need it, instead of trying to generalize. Generalizing a concatenative structure leads to something like Factor.)
Just adding s-expressions is actually a huge jump up in syntactic complexity and structure, since now you can define a whole hierarchy statically, "on the page", instead of having to use a series of stack operations to manipulate memory from afar. And then as you lucidly put it, going from s-expressions to a practical Lisp dialect adds another level of context on top of that.
(And yeah, it's possible to bolt structure onto a Forth dialect, too, but the "Chuck Moore way" is that you do that custom every time you need it, instead of trying to generalize. Generalizing a concatenative structure leads to something like Factor.)