I wanted to preserve the "code is just lists" property of lisps. Compiling the lists away means that property is lost: the code becomes bytecode or native code instead, sacrificing lisp's soul in exchange for performance.

I want to implement a partial evaluator one day. That should go a long way to improving performance by precomputing and inlining things as much as possible.

Sometimes people avoid that by making a stupidly cheap code generator that goes straight from the input file format to unoptimized machine code. Because you only have to reach a fraction of what the optimized code would achieve for throughput.