I'm glad to hear that because so far my impression agrees with yours (before you learned Lisp) and this comment[0]. Do you happen to know a good tutorial to learn Emacs Lisp?
But the way that I actually got competent enough to do anything interesting with it was to learn Common Lisp, because they are similar in that learning to solve problems in Common Lisp lets you do the same in Elisp. I learned Common Lisp by reading Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel and writing small programs.
I would really recommend spending a little time learning both dialects because it's easy to learn "just enough" elisp to configure your setup but not enough to appreciate what you can do with it.