ocicl author here. What I'm attempting to provide with ocicl is a) a system that is easier for "Enterprise" developers to work with (TLS by default, repos hosted on well-known domains that exist in enterprise firewall "allow-lists", well documented/supported solution for mirroring contents (OCI registry mirroring), etc). I occasionally work within secure, highly regulated environments, and it was pretty much impossible to use sbcl+quicklisp because of all of the security constraints. ocicl make this possible today. b) a fully transparent set of tools and processes that are not dependent on Quicklisp and for which a community of maintainers could be established. I think it's been a success on (a), and a work-in-progress for (b). qlot is also nice if all you are looking for is a way to deal with project-local library dependencies.