I understand and agree with your point, but have always cast it in a slightly different light. I think some languages having longer or steeper learning curves than others, but when used effectively this can allow the language to be more expressive and efficient in developer time for both writing and reading. It's analogous to the communication in a field between an expert and novice, or between two experts. The experts can rely on their shared experience to succinctly explain a concept, which the novice requires detailed explanations for. This makes communication between experts highly efficient, but requires a lot of investment to get to that level of expertise.

I find programming languages follow the same rules, but often you are communicating with yourself (sometimes time shifted by minutes, hours or days). If you are an expert in a language that allows complex concepts to be defined concisely, you can use those idiomatic constructs to express your intent and another expert may easily grasp that intent, but a novice may find that much harder to comprehend. Conversely, a language that does not allow complex concepts to be expressed concisely will be easier for a novice to understand, but there is an inherent loss in efficiency for experts in that language that must resort to continuously defining complex concepts with the simpler concepts the language supports (boilerplate, in this case).

Neither type of language is inherently better than the other (as much as people like to assume so), they are just trade-offs that have different benefits and drawbacks based on the people or teams that use them. A team with low turnover and high experience could benefit greatly from the long-term use of a language that supports higher level concepts succinctly, while a a team with lower expertise or high turnover might find that extends the learning period of new hires. It's fairly easy to point out languages that have chosen one path over the other, such as Java and Haskell. I think an interesting case is Perl, which supports both, and I think that's a large source of the idea that Perl code is unreadable. It's made to be easy enough to understand in many cases at first glance, while also supporting a lot of higher level concepts. This can cause people that use it to experience very different levels of complexity in close proximity, which can be jarring for the novice, and sometimes the competent user as well.