Disclaimer: I like Scheme and love Racket but have an ongoing exercise in Common Lisp. [1]
Common Lisp has the advantage of having done a pretty good job at the hard problem of naming things and so ordinary activities have names with regular semantics like |remove| and |remove-if| -- generally |some-name| tests against a value and |some-name-if| tests against a predicate. Functions on sequences have keywords as supporting parts of speech that make it possible to state intent rather than write an implementation -- Common Lisp contains several domain specific languages that have proven to be useful.
One way to learn them is to read Steele's, Common Lisp: the language.
It's not that a programmer can't write their own version of |copy-tree| and a naive implementation is fairly easy. It's not but nominally more difficult or verbose than writing it in a Scheme or Clojure. The difference is that Common Lisp's built in |copy-tree| is probably sophisticated for performance and robustness reasons. Schemes come out of a pedagogical context and there not having a built-in |copy-tree| can be a feature because of what people may learn by its absence. Racket's Student Languages push this toward the limit.
To put it another way, Assembly Code has fewer constructs than Python, but often there is an advantage that comes with Python's higher level abstractions.
There's more stuff in Common Lisp, but once I learned the concepts behind how the naming worked, a lot of them didn't need to be learned as much as I just assumed they were there.
The "standard library" is large, but really well thought out. Writing in Scheme, I'd often need to implement functions that I knew were already in CL, so Scheme ends up being more work in the long run.
And it's not like a person needs to memorize all of the language constructs before using it. The REPL in Slime is incredibly helpful in discovering functions and verifying how they work, and Stack Overflow or web search can be really helpful finding out if a particular function is built-in or not.
Common Lisp has the advantage of having done a pretty good job at the hard problem of naming things and so ordinary activities have names with regular semantics like |remove| and |remove-if| -- generally |some-name| tests against a value and |some-name-if| tests against a predicate. Functions on sequences have keywords as supporting parts of speech that make it possible to state intent rather than write an implementation -- Common Lisp contains several domain specific languages that have proven to be useful.
One way to learn them is to read Steele's, Common Lisp: the language.
It's not that a programmer can't write their own version of |copy-tree| and a naive implementation is fairly easy. It's not but nominally more difficult or verbose than writing it in a Scheme or Clojure. The difference is that Common Lisp's built in |copy-tree| is probably sophisticated for performance and robustness reasons. Schemes come out of a pedagogical context and there not having a built-in |copy-tree| can be a feature because of what people may learn by its absence. Racket's Student Languages push this toward the limit.
To put it another way, Assembly Code has fewer constructs than Python, but often there is an advantage that comes with Python's higher level abstractions.
[1] Why the hurry: http://norvig.com/21-days.html