>>5 I guess it's something to get used to, and it does explain why in some lisp forums people have warned me that my local defines were actually global.
But, I mean, surely you can see calling these procedures without arguments and expecting to get different results depending on the context of the call kind of goes against Scheme's functional tendencies.
If you don't want to write in a functional style, Common Lisp is a much better choice. But that's not a deficiency of scheme (or Common Lisp), it's just a philosophical difference between the two languages.