But I've started to wonder. In some ways I feel "our" area in the company has been a victim of our own success: By doing things in smart/efficient ways, the tasks we've done has become seen as simple, we didn't need to recruit as much, and eventually because of the low number of people occupied on the task in the organization it is seen as easier or less important and we are more vulnerable to churn than larger teams.
I've seen simpler problems getting solved in (what I think is) very inefficient ways and I used to scoff at that. But now I think what they gain is a large robust team, which can handle both churn and have more weight politically in the organization. Solving something inefficiently simply offers a way to have more people do the same task, for redundancy.
In a sense, once an organization hits a certain size it seems that efficiency in a programming language is an anti-feature. You WANT a larger set of programmers to be happily working on something just to have a larger team around the code and redundancy in people. If a programming language / environment allows you to be too efficient, then too few people get the job done and you become vulnerable.
At least, that's the best explanation I have at what's really going on in the industry.