I don't think it really makes sense to try to roll your own module system? I mean, the whole point is to be able to easily share code with the community, right?
Obviously Fare Rideau thought it was a good idea when he started hacking on ASDF. He could just have used Defsystem or whatever. It's very popular now, but its name stands for "another system definition facility" for Lisp!
If you don't like anything, roll your own.
Sharing with the community isn't the entire point of a module system; it's also to internally organize the software you're working on, whether you're just one hacker or a team of one hundred. Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 language has a module system, and so does Ada. The concept of sharing modules with the community didn't even exist.
A module system as a hub for sharing is a relatively new thing: it's a fusion of the ideas from open source OS distro package management and language modules.
If you want racket-style modules you can also have them by implementing them.
> To be fair this seems like a pretty common mindset in CL-land.
My Lisp Machine has around 60000 functions, and I have only written a tiny fraction of them... Strange. If nobody else has written them, where are they coming from?