1. Using the assoc function I would still have pass in a number to find the value for a given attribute a user chooses, correct? Which means I still would have to write an iteration function to find the position of that value to return and then would run into the same problem.

2. I have an assumption that when working with large volumes of data one would want to use a table, and small volumes should use a list....Is this correct? (my example above is only for testing)...

Something like this?

  (= names* 
    (obj person1 '("Jon" "Mid" "Dow")
         person2 '("Alex" "Morse" "Lstname") 
         person3 '("Jane" "Moodd" "Meow")))

  (def get-name-part (person part)
       ((names* person) ((obj first 0 middle 1 last 2) part)))

Essentially I'm taking a spreadsheet file (csv) with an arbitrary number of columns of data, reading in the headers so they can be output to the html table as headers then reading in the remainder to create rows in the html table.

also also letting users to pick and choose which columns of data they want by selecting header names.

  (def keep-cols (cols tabl) ;for one row
     (map [let nr -1 (keep [some (++ nr) cols] _)] tabl))

  (def get-cols (cols tabl) ;table with selected columns
      (withs ((head . rows) tabl
              colnrs (rem nil (map [pos _ head] cols))
              filtered-rows (keep-cols colnrs rows))
        (cons cols filtered-rows)))

  ;test
  (get-cols '(foo baz) '((foo bar baz) ;header
                         (bla bla spam)
                         (eggs ham bacon) 
                         (lorem ipsum test)))

I'm going to step through some of the syntax; I haven't been using: map, [], or "." yet.