Racket's macro system is quite baroque and supports a lot of things. You don't need to use hygienic "syntax-rules" at all. Consider writing your own transformer [1], which can be an arbitrary lambda function without restriction.

Or, import defmacro [2] and use that.

As can be seen, Racket actually provides more power and choice in this regard, including support for Common Lisp's way.

In any case, I make no claim to either being better or worse. I just think Racket is more principled in its mechanisms for defining and delivering a DSL to a user.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/proc-macros.html

[2] https://docs.racket-lang.org/compatibility/defmacro.html

Agree with "Racket is more principled..." Where I differ with you if that I'd say that Racket theorically provides more power, but the system is not tractable in practice. I suspect all large Racket programs were written by people with PhD's from Northwestern.

BTW, Racket's defmacro is only partially compatible with Common Lisp defmacro. It doesn't really work. I even seem to remember (? from long ago) that it's impossible to implement a genuine CL defmacro in Racket.

not totally wrong but i did write this https://github.com/disconcision/fructure with ~2 years programming experience. implementation features some nice simple define-syntax-rule macros which i maybe never wouldve managed with defmacro