I think you're right on that point of contention, it's too far to assert a universal and clear good/bad dynamic here because that line between developer/user is contextual and fuzzy.

Another interesting irony I'll note, Lisp is the "New Jersey approach" towards symbolic AI. Americans clinging to their Lisp systems were deeply entrenched in a "worse-is-better" mindset. Your interface, the computational model, didn't need to be designed for logic programming, that was wholly secondary. Do everything as much as possible in Lisp, and then offload the relational description to a small (not simple) library. American knowledge engineers were looked at as overpaid procedural hackers with zero mathematical elegance and very little credibility. More or less the same perception these self-same Lisp-machine users had for Unix and C programmers.

It's all about perspective, at the end of the day. Where we draw the line in the sand on these categories is free-to-choose, yet it also determines everything. We're always someone else's villain under different semantics.