> saw it nearly 13 years ago in my internship and have done primarily .NET stuff in the interim

If you've mainly done .NET stuff since you started out then I don't see how you can consider it well ahead or not. I've not used C# professionally since 2007 so I can't really comment either, other than that I've not wanted to go back to it, though I'm sure it's changed immensely. If you've not worked with other languages and tooling I don't think you're in a position to say what's best.