Honestly, I've written a fair amount of Lisp, and sometimes Lisp-like languages (e.g. GCC RTL), and never felt the need for either paredit or parinfer, and virtually never use structural navigation either.
Somehow the assisted indentation in Emacs is enough that I've never been confused about parentheses or felt the need to have them typed for me. I find them visually clear, so long as the indentation is not misleading.
I do find the close-paren matching which lets me know when a mismatching parenthesis is typed quite useful though. I use that in all programming languages, sometimes to tell me where a long block begins.
So I wouldn't agree that paredit or parinfer are essential.
For me, the fastest available cursor key repeat rate is more essential. I code like it's a video game: Hold down cursor key, let go when it lands in the right place. Write what I need, newlines and all, use <tab> or C-M-q a few times to trigger automatic indentation as needed. But this applies to all languages, not just Lisp.
Somehow the assisted indentation in Emacs is enough that I've never been confused about parentheses or felt the need to have them typed for me. I find them visually clear, so long as the indentation is not misleading.
I do find the close-paren matching which lets me know when a mismatching parenthesis is typed quite useful though. I use that in all programming languages, sometimes to tell me where a long block begins.
So I wouldn't agree that paredit or parinfer are essential.
For me, the fastest available cursor key repeat rate is more essential. I code like it's a video game: Hold down cursor key, let go when it lands in the right place. Write what I need, newlines and all, use <tab> or C-M-q a few times to trigger automatic indentation as needed. But this applies to all languages, not just Lisp.