It doesn't matter what was before 3 decades. You have the environment that exists now. You can use better Lisp, if it's good enough now, for what you need to do. For the resource limited and performance critical stuff I still use C and a lot of actual environments still need C-level performance and the resource use patterns.

And all this is not because of what RMS did or didn't do. He did great things, and I don't agree that anybody can claim that he could have done something differently given the real constrains he had.