And therein lies part of the problem. Just as you don't need genius level engineers to do applications that are 80% CRUD, you don't need genius level technologies either. Hiring the former can lead to the development of the latter.
Sometimes it takes an above-average engineer to go against the fashion and say that a LAMP monolith should suffice. In particular, it requires an ability to realistically estimate the load and the complexity.
Sometimes, the LAMP stack will do.