You don't need to do something super cool to use CL. Boring stuff works too. I use a small program in production© that reads a DB, formats data and sends it to FTP servers. Was a breeze to develop, is a breeze to deploy. It's a better experience overall for me than doing it in Python.

Oh, and I do use CL's super powers during development: interactive debugger, restarting a point in the stackframe, fast and incremental compilation, good type checks by SBCL… and I get a fast binary.

Learning didn't come without a few gotchas, but they're all better documented out there now.