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?

>>5
I don't see the benefit of using a defmacro here? Why not use a regular function and declare it to be inlined, it should yield the same behaviour.