(setf *print-case* :downcase)
in your .sbclrc (or whatever the equivalent is for your implementation) and never have to see all-caps again.And yeah, the default upcasing is ugly and inelegant, but they were trying to support the caps-only machines & code still in use at the time. It’s one of the key things I’d change in a modern Lisp standard.
But you have to admit: when the default print-case is one of the worst things in a language, that language is doing pretty well.