That is, that it is clearly trying to be Lisp (just look at all those brackets!) but without the readability or power of Lisp.

I think there's a fundamental difference here. LISP looks like that because it has to look like that. It's a direct consequence of being minimalistic and functional. XSLT looks like that because the designers thought that XML is Good. There isn't an underlieing, theoretical reason why XSLT has to be implemented that way, as there is with LISP.