People complain about Lisp's parenthesis all the time. I almost never found them bothersome and this comes from a Lisp newbie. My editor is vim though, not emacs.

The only occasion that parens have bothered me is when I have to read code printed on paper. Some code pieces are too beautiful to resist the temptation of taking a print out for a weekend reading, comment out bits with a pencil, scribble arrows all over it etc. Its then when I have to match tiny parens printed 2-up on a piece of paper that it gets frustrating, my eyes not being what they used to be (but I still print 2-up).

A thought just occurred to me: maybe add a pretty printing mode to a2ps that draws the parens in different sizes and gray scale values. May be some day.