Yeah, braino -- thanks. A custom binding form would be another way to do it, but I'd prefer the pseudo-destructuring -- cleaner and more concise. I'd hope a new lisp-2 dialect would come with better destructuring support for defun and binding forms anyway (destructuring-bind, multiple-value-bind and flet could all be subsumed by let if (values ...) (function ...) where valid left hand patterns).
We could write a macro for that or a new version of defun. Here just a macro lisp1fy: