I'm not saying that newlisp is to be avoided, but:
Lisp's power is not in its lack of 'syntax', but in the specific way that the code is structured. You can write code that writes code. The regular structure of the code helps this, not the specific syntaxes.
The Fexpr vs. macro comparison is bogus.
In common lisp (or scheme or Clojure) you will normally not be macro-expanding the macro more than once (when you compile it).
You will notice that compiled versions (cl or scheme) of these tests trounce newLISP soundly. Eval is to be avoided because most of the time there are are a lot of more structured ways to do exactly the same thing. Evaluating arbitrary code is very clever and can lead to a very big headache.
I don't know about the rest other than that 'we have fork' is probably not going to buy you much from clojure folks.
I think a better argument for newLisp would have been:
1.) It is lispier than python or C.
2.) It is simple and good for scripting, and therefore good for lisp newbies (you don't have to get your head around macros or the intricacies of eql eq equal, equalp and =).
I think that the CL community appears so abrasive because the language is so complex (this has nothing to do with syntax, but simply the size and complexity of the spec). You have to make serious effort to understand/know it before you can even begin to ask reasonable questions about it.
Even people who have been programming CL for years can get things wrong answering from the top of their head. It is not poorly documented, it is just huge and in some respects complex.