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For corporations, consistant work is often more desirable than exceptional work. Amassing thousands of lines of code that only exceptional programmers can use, understand and modify is a liability, not an asset, no matter how efficient it is.

[mindslight]

Which is a quality of a fundamentally broken organizational system that measures power in (and therefore optimizes for) number of people controlled, as well as the government-directed economy that underwrites it.

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tl;dr: there's a reason most startups prefer javascript to smalltalk.

Which is a quality of a fundamentally broken organizational system

No, it's a quality of a robust organizational system. Let's take a program that parses html as an example. What would you think of an html parser that only works well with high quality, strictly structured html and breaks under poorly formatted html? You would call it a fragile, broken system. But a parser that deals equally well with low quality html would be a well thought out, robust system. And here's the key to the point I was making: the robust system could be relied upon to do its job consistently even under less than ideal conditions.

A system that requires exceptional engineers to maintain it is a huge source of risk for any company. If your current exceptional engineer leaves for whatever reason, you have to find another one. If the reason your engineer left is your company is suddenly facing insolvency thanks to a nasty patent dispute, all you may be able to afford to hire is a college grad to maintain what you've already got.