I was requesting valid scheme that did not work properly.
Given the https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/ shows Gerbil passing more tests than many other implementations, it seems hard to call it a "non-scheme".
Academic as in, there are many places where the person[s] working on the code or feature abruptly stopped. As if they graduated and were no longer working on it.
Umm superficially you could say it is anything. The reality is it IS Scheme. (define (foo bar) (format "hi ~a" bar)) works just fine. As will any of the Scheme code, as it's merely syntactic sugar, (import :std/sugar) that you are confusing with a whole new language.
The best CL implementations unfortunately are not opensource.
There is still a large use of Lispworks by many heavy CL developers. And anyone who has used it knows what they have to offer over the opensource equivalents.
Support is something well worth its cost.
Plus in production things tend to just work on Allegro and Lispworks. They tend to bench well for the things we need.
http://ftp.linux.org.uk/~ober/report.html