No syntactic sugar needed. In most lisp pattern matching libraries there are higher level matchers such as "list" etc. Just as the first element of a list is a function or special operator in normal context, in a pattern matching context the first element is a matcher. You can even define new matchers if you want, just like you can define new functions. This makes pattern matching libraries in lisp more powerful than the built-in pattern matching of Haskell and other functional languages.

I just looked at TFA and yes, it's truly awful. It doesn't have to be that way. See e.g. https://github.com/m2ym/optima (a pattern matching library for common lisp). I haven't tried it, but I've tried the predecessor of that library.