> "could I express this as s-expressions?" Sure. "Would I want to?" Hell no.

Of course it is possible to implement syntactic sugar in Lisp which supports JSON style expressions. DSLs are common in Lisp, and that actually became a weakness of Lisp (so-called "DSL hell").

The interesting thing about s-expr is that Lisp doesn't need special data conversion tools to handle them. Even control structures are expressed as s-expr, and they can be created and modified dynamically which means that even code can be exchanged at runtime on the fly.