I'm not sure about Schemes in general but you've described my experience of Racket precisely. It's somehow a completely different feel. For me the 'live system' Lisp spirit is fluid and always makes things modifiable and bend to the will of the programmer. The 'batch' sensibility thwarts this. It shows up particularly in module systems that force you to jump through hoops that aren't worth it and that compound into difficulty upon difficulty. In this respect the Common Lisp package system has always struck me as a miracle of design: it allows disparate systems to compose, while allowing the programmer full access to whatever they want to do. You just sometimes need to type an extra colon—a small price to pay.