[ekidd]

It's unethical to inflict "needlessly hard" technologies on a client who isn't using them already. But an enormous fraction of the world's valuable, productive software is both needlessly complex and built using (arguably) obsolete tools and frameworks.

The are good career reasons to think long and hard before specializing in this stuff. After all, once you go too far down the rabbit hole, you may not be able to climb back out, and nobody wants to be a 35-year-old developer with a completely obsolete skill set.

But if you're a 55-year-old consultant, you may be planning to retire long before the systems you're working on disappear. In this case, I can't see anything wrong with specializing in ugly, valuable dinosaurs that nobody else wants to get near. Under the right circumstances, I've heard of this work paying $350/hour and up.

[raverbashing]

> The are good career reasons to think long and hard before specializing in this stuff. After all, once you go too far down the rabbit hole, you may not be able to climb back out, and nobody wants to be a 35-year-old developer with a completely obsolete skill set.

Exactly

Also you spent time learning something completely unusable beyond a certain niche, that usually does not transport anywhere back to "sanity land"

I'm strongly opposed learning something that will be good for nothing beyond actually making the wheels of bureaucracy and/or legacy turn