Well, first of all I'm not saying copying, but be inspired by. And the "trying to make things easy" thing is not to be underestimated man, just look at ruby. 10 years ago nobody ever heard of the language besides the japanese academic community.
Seaside for instance, is inspiring a lot of good programmers on learning smalltalk, which has the same 'only for academia' aura that LISP has.
As for the 'convention over configuration' fraud, I disagree with you mate. Rails enforces a way to think, which is not a bad thing. The filesystem is a configuration file, but one that is pre configured, and to change the behavior of rails you have to dig in, thus enforcing the "rails way".
Those restrictions breed creativity and speed, because they leave less room to be distracted by any details that are not the building of your app out.
I agree that frameworks should make things easy, but 'convention over configuration' doesn't do that. It just calls configuration by another name. If being hard to configure is a virtue, then I can show you lots of frameworks that do that ;)
The point is that there is a default config mate. So there is a "way" of the framework, so the majority of people who don't want to configure nothing, won't have to. That does make it harder to the minority, but those are probably already experienced enough to don't mind the pain.
