Gregor Kiczales, one of the guys behind the MOP, gave a retrospective on the MOP [1], in which he did touch on the influence of Brian C. Smith's Ph.D. thesis and 3-Lisp. One thing he said (as I recall - I'm paraphrasing here) was that 3-Lisp got quoting right, and if he'd read Smith's thesis a tenth (!) time he might have understood that in time to make the requisite changes to the MOP. I want to read the thesis myself, but it's something like 700+ pages.
The bit I was thinking of starts around 29:45 in the audio linked above, runs to about 33:30. Note that the audio quality is somewhat bad - the retrospective was at a meeting in a restaurant with a band playing in the background.
The arguments about lexical scoping that this is refuting were some of the same for elisp not originally including lexical scoping (It was added in 2012, and enabled by default in 2020).
If you get an account on Bottomless Abyss BBS [0], the message base has a USENET archive, but it only goes back to 2019 for comp.lang.lisp. So, useless for historical research, but fun for reading recent stuff.
https://groups.google.com/g/net.lang.lisp/c/GSaNSpmnKBU
lisp vs C
* >1) Is such flexibility and power a trait unique to lisp, or are the Symbolics > programmers simply very good (or both)? *
Some things never change.