After writing Clojure for a few years, there were several times where I ended up with a complex function with unbalanced parens, and the only way I could fix it was to basically re-write the function piece by piece. This is something I've never had to do in any other language.

I'd also end up in not great places when utilizing parinfer while editing code written using different formatting than what parinfer expected. I'd have to fall back to paredit and hope for the best.

This is all to say that yes, sometimes editing lisp syntax is "hard", at least for me. Turns out some humans make so-so AST parsers.

That said, structural editing is great once you get good at it, and something I miss back in other languages.