It wasn't a hard thing for me to adopt OSS. It was a marketing idea that brought Cohen and Frye to this. They are both relentless fools.
This keeps coming up in various shapes and forms but the fact of the matter is that brilliant, high producers aggregate in places; and so do idiots.
Tom DeMarco ran a study of this in the 80s wherein teams were asked to solve the same problem. He expected a scatter-plot. It was a 45 degree line between the people who knocked the problem off and those who were clueless.
What didn't matter:
Platform. Language (except assembler, those folks were _lost_.) Operating System.
What did matter:
Team coherence and capability.
Design and planning; raw ability to design and plan as a coherent team. And not just a bunch of losers following a Pythonesque "Book of Common Knowledge."
(I have been to many "Does the witch weigh less than wood" meetings...)
Look at the back cover of Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics." What he _measured_ was that team capability overarchs everything. Period.
I would also ask you to look at the surface exposure of development. Folks who develop on the shoulders of many giants can and should be trying lots of stuff, because that's why platforms are built.
Folks working closer to the core (the OS, drivers, fundamental code) don't change as quickly, nor should they.
I've worked as a hatmaker (sheer, unbridled creativity with fancy ribbons and flowers and such) for high-end ladies and I've sat, confounded by bad documentation for UARTS.
Two different regimes.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin