>>6
People are drawn to the power of LISPs and use them to develop real software. You don't get an accurate representation of the strength or usage of a language by looking at what's popular on public internet forums. I think "social" people are drawn towards languages like JS, Ruby, Python, etc for whatever reason. Social people are much more likely to namefag on forums/reddit and pump out endless blogspam which gives a false representation of how "alive" the language is. Of course those languages are used, but the amount of substantial software written in those languages is nothing compared to Java, C, C++. And by "substantial software" I mean something other than webapps that power adtech/SaaS startups which will be gone and forgotten in 2 years.
I think I may have just restated one of your points in a more verbose manner, but I'm trying to say that judging how "alive" a language is subjective. And I have no real interest in reading a bunch of spammy blog entries written to farm upvotes reddit or hackernews. That's not to say I haven't stumbled across many excellent and informative blog entries that made me a better programmer, but that quality > quantity *ESPECIALLY* with the current state of the internet.
I really don't think there's anything wrong with the state of LISPs right now.