99% of programming works like this: you pass parameters to a function/macro. If you screw up, the compiler spits an error. The details of the error message are rarely relevant, you mostly know what's wrong even before you read that message anyway.
This whole talk about macros being crazy dangerous and difficult is very misguided. Most of the time, if a Lisp compiler spits a weird message on you, you know what you've screwed up. In the 1% cases you don't, you apply macroexpand-1 (or equivalent), see why the expansion doesn't make sense and fix it. In the 1% of the cases it doesn't help, you keep reading the source until you understand what's wrong. It's no different than debugging functions. Same rules apply.
This whole talk about macros being crazy dangerous and difficult is very misguided. Most of the time, if a Lisp compiler spits a weird message on you, you know what you've screwed up. In the 1% cases you don't, you apply macroexpand-1 (or equivalent), see why the expansion doesn't make sense and fix it. In the 1% of the cases it doesn't help, you keep reading the source until you understand what's wrong. It's no different than debugging functions. Same rules apply.