Functions that churn out lambdas - when?

I just wrote my own "repeated" implementation (SICP lecture 3x), and I thought the same could have been done with something of the format (repeated procedure item times), instead of dealing with another layer of abstraction by churning out a procedure that does the actual iteration ((repeated procedure times) item). At this point, choosing between both forms seems like an arbitrary flip of the coin - can anyone on /prog/ enlighten me?

>>13
((foo bar) baz) is just syntactic sugar for me and I don't need it, because the occasions I do this are very rare.
In other words, LIFP!