It never took off because developers are modern Sisyphi, who when freed of their burdens immediately yearn for the feel and heft of the cold stone boulder in their hands. That's how we got Java: enough of Lisp to be tolerable and familiar to C++ programmers.
With rare exceptions like emacs and clojure's datomic I feel like such a lauded language should have more to show.
And yet, there's comparatively much more killer applications written in php alone than all lisps combined.
I am proficient in several lisps by the way (Racket, CL, Emacs Lisp, Scheme) and honestly every time I need to start a "serious" project I just feel like any other language depending on the use case is a better fit.
I speculate the following - if there are few developers who love lisp, then all can try to mob program a lisp code base -- multiple cursors, same time (code review and development all happen parallel). (Not sure if such an editor exists) This would be a good way to maintain a lisp code base I think (speculation). (Compared to Java where you can work mostly alone and make a mess and it will still work somewhat OK)