Funny, a macro serves the job you seek:

    (loop :for x :below 10
          :do (print x))

This is a macro that presents a new abstraction/concept that's not "in AST format". It's a concept that's presented in syntax similar to any of the stock imperative languages.

That's the raison d'etre of macro: to expose these concepts/abstractions/etc. in a direct manner.

There are bad macros, to be sure, which are half-baked and underdocumented. That's no different a criticism from Python functions being 500 line god functions with boolean input flags, etc. Both cases are cases of bad code.