Well, I do not totally agree with you there. I have programmed in Arc both for fun and work, and have also coded in Scheme a little, and I really find the . and ! syntax is really a good thing for structure access, mainly when you have nested structures. You know, when you have 3 or 4 opening parentheses at the same time. Too sad you can't fully use it in these situations.
But it's not a problem of fear of parentheses ; actually I couldn't find other cases where . and ! could be used without feeling a bit ugly (i.e. in calling functions or macros). Yes, parentheses & s-exprs are great, but I don't believe they should be the only syntax for accessing structures.
Don't worry anyway, I don't think Paul would integrate suggestions he considers weak, even if many of us asked it.
