Comment by dieggsy

You may already know of these, but for others curious:

I'm also not a huge fan of quicklisp, though bundles[0] made it a little more bearable for me. You may also consider vend[1], ocicl[2] (heavily AI-assisted recently), or qlot[3].

  [0] https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/bundles.html
  [1] https://github.com/fosskers/vend
  [2] https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl
  [3] https://github.com/fukamachi/qlot

For macroexpansion, SLIME and SLY have macrostep functionality that lets you expand macros in place, which has helped me immensely on more than one occasion, though you can also manually expand with macroexpand.