Thank you for responses. I didn't intend to make it look as if I'm blaming Hunchentoot developers for anything I mentioned above. Sorry if that how it looks. My question was rather: is this an average path for someone to get things working? In attempt to study the subject myself I came across a lot of information, and being new I have sometimes no idea of whether the information is of any real value.
For example, my choice of SBCL of all CL variety was based upon comments on Stack Overflow site. I did not try all other kinds. Now, this is not a complaint, I really want to know, if my final goal is to use Hunchentoot, is SBCL a good choice or not? In my experience "more forgiving" tends to give more problems in the end, but I'm not sure what that would meant in given context.
Regarding installations - as per my experience with other environments, automatic tools rarely work (Ruby gems would be another perfect example!). Yet I don't know enough to make installations completely by hand, I would much prefer to see this sort of instructions. Again, per my experience, most often an "installation" would scale down to unpacking an archive to several folders and defining several environmental variables, however, I simply don't know which files should go where, and what environmental variables to set, if I wanted to make sure there was not an error on my side. This also leaves me in the situation when I'm clueless as to who to blame for broken installation... I don't even know how the properly working environment looks like...
Another reason for asking here is that, again, knowing how it happens with other technologies, it's worth at least to try to figure out if what I'm facing is not some sort of known problem. For instance, I came across a notion of Hunchentoot not installing on SBCL, it was filed against some clone of SBCL on github under category "wishes and future improvements" in April last year. It is unresolved so far. This information helps understanding that there was a problem, yet I cannot figure out if it was ever fixed, and even if it has anything to do with my setup.
That's why I asked about bug tracker. It would be ultimately helpful to search some source being certain that the information found may be trusted.

This may sound again a silly question... but how would I log what happens during package installation? Often times the console capacity is not enough to accommodate all messages displayed during compile, but I cannot just redirect the output to a file, because I would miss the restarts etc...
Thank you.