People frequently complained about GOTO in BASIC, but the really weak part was GOSUB which kept a "return address" on the stack but didn't support parameters or local variables.

There were a few competitive language cultures but they all had a big disadvantage relative to BASIC which was that BASIC could fit into a machine with 4k of RAM and did well on machines like the TRS-80 Model I not to mention the old PDP-8.

Pascal was popular among those who liked static typed languages, it was a bear to compile code for it for machines like the 6502 with limited registers and addressing modes.

Logo was popular among those who liked Lisp (MIT) and had graphical capabilities that were really engaging.

FORTH wasn't considered good for education but ambitious programmers found it a step between BASIC and assembly and it used the stack in a clever way which made it look like Lisp flipped backwards, complete with compile and run time modes that made it possible to write your own control structures.

By '83 or so even cheap machines could fill out the whole 64k and you would have had more choices than BASIC (I had C on my TRS-80 Color Computer!) but BASIC was pretty entrenched by then. Certainly you could have gotten Lisp to run on the 6502.