I'm not a programmer, but still currently learning Common Lisp. I've tried to program a GUI for some of my learning projects for similar reasons as you, using LTK (CL bindings to TK, I suppose Tkinter is similar). It was a very frustrating experience, as opposed to my general experience with CL, and I have abandoned any attempt to do a GUI for now. So I understand how you feel about it, I really hate it too!