This seems really off-base to me. I don't think I've ever once heard a Lisper say "it works in my image". The consensus in a recent discussion on the pro-lisp group is that images are useful primarily for long-running servers, not for development. In any case, standard practice when putting out any CL code other than a snippet is to supply an .asd file with it. That seems to refute what you're saying.

Can you supply concrete instances of this "it works in my image" attitude? It should be easy if it's as common as you say.