He was not only relaying an experience, as he cites the Lisp Curse. See:

"I do believe in the Lisp curse that the power of the language is in some respects self-undermining because it empowers the individual and so tends to attract people who don't work well in teams."

And I'm sure you've read the Lisp Curse.

His essay argues that he's really not a great programmer, but Lisp gets him to principal engineer! He further implies that Lisp really is something beyond other languages with his statement about the planner code (of code, he never considers that porting often fails even within the same language family for a variety of reasons).

I'm sure with a Sun Java marketing budget and the right pepole we could make Lisp as popular as we wanted.

How do you explain C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, and PHP? None had very extensive marketing budgets.

So all that being said, to address your actual point (however disjoint from the OP it might be), nobody's claiming it's a "super language", just often better for the people who commit to using it despite it's unpopularity. I can back up my claims of betterness with arguments about worthiness, but not about popularity, but then I don't think the later kind of argument matters in the first place.

I don't know what your metric of worthiness is. Maybe its the existence of some esoteric feature. You say I talk about popularity, but I only do so to ask for an example of the "worthiness" you speak of. As I said before the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. If you tell me you have some great pudding, but it tastes like cow dung, I won't be impressed regardless of how many fine ingredients you use and advanced cooking methods employed. It still tastes like cow dung. And I'm not saying that Lisp is cow dung, but I am saying that fancy ingredients and world class ovens don't impress me if you're making the same McDonald's sandwich as everyone else.

And when you start creating great pudding, you won't need the marketing budget.