[hvidgaard]

If I had to choose, the former is more important to me, and it works for us, I've not had a bad hire yet in a market where getting new developers is difficult.

Refactoring with or without tooling in static or dynamic languages, is about recognizing a piece of the code base that should be refactored and what the goal is. Tool and language can make this easier or harder, but that is again, something you can train them in and all new developers get a mentor for as long as they need, even senior developers.