There is a good reason for this "ugliness": it makes it easier to distinguish the things that you typed in vs the things that Lisp printed out. Nowadays we can make these distinctions with fonts, but back in the teletype days this was a really useful feature. Yes, the teletype days are over, but teriminal.app still exists and there are situations where interacting with Lisp directly through a terminal is useful, and so this feature can still be useful even today. Like the parens, it takes a little getting used to, but once you're used to it, you'll miss it when it's not there.
