[manmal]

I'd say they are optimizing locally. Yes, if you could write Cobol in the 70s/80s, you better optimized on writing Cobol, because it was all the hotness. But you should have stepped out of this local optimum somewhere in the 90s, and switched to OO languages. Moving away from what you already know in favor of something you don't yet know is painful if you are not used to it, but it's necessary - dinosaurs die.