You know, after seeing over and over how the supposedly worse ways actually worked better - perhaps it's time to re-decide what is actually good and bad in a language?
Maybe all the "better" languages are a case of misdirected optimization, where the critical resource is developer time?
In many ways, experienced programmers and language elitists are a lot like corporations. They are risk-averse. The reason best practices are what they are is to avoid known problems (sort of like bureaucracy). This will make you a better programmer to a certain point, but it's also so easy to overestimate risk. The painful truth is that a 20-year-old hacker figuring out things as he goes may be able to plow through the naive problems he inevitably creates and arrive at a finished, valuable product faster than a seasoned developer who writes uber-maintainable code with a comprehensive test suite and every best practice he can lay his hands on.