I can TOTALLY relate! I'm in pretty much the same position with a depression that grows stronger with every day I'm not doing something to break out of the situation. Making things worse is the fact that I've solely been doing Perl web development for the last 12(!) years at the same company. When I started web development in 99, it was all fun and play. I had the feeling I was at the forefront of technology and only few people could do what I did. Then I got stuck with Perl and had to see it going out of fashion (nevertheless, I seriously still think it's a wonderful language that gets the job done and with the Modern Perl tools available in a very maintainable way as well, but I digress). Years passed, and here I am. A Perl developer in a country where Perl has completely vanished off the surface. I'd never go so far as to call myself a Perl expert either. Neither have I written a couple of frameworks or libraries (like the pros you mention) nor have I poked around in the internals of the interpreter. I'm just a web guy, who is equally good at front- and backend development, but neither a rockstar in one of them. Jack of all trades, master of none fits my person best. Once sought-after in the internet hay days, nowadays replaced by an army of experts and specialists.
I'm thinking about leaving development as well, but what are the alternatives? Going into management? I don't have the experience to apply for such a position at another company and I don't see this happening at my current employer because we're rather small. Similar to you, I lost my motivation over the years and find it hard to justify learning new stuff (like Ruby, Rails, Python, node.js, maybe Cocoa development, etc.) because it'll go out of fashion soon again anyway and takes me considerably more time to digest than those prodigy developers the internet seems to be full of. But maybe, things aren't like they appear. What's the percentage of rockstar developers among all developers? It's most certainly not close to 90% as the internet and all the cool blogs make us think ...
Sorry I couldn't be of more help, just wanted to let you know that there are others out there in pretty much the same situation. All the best!
I'm thinking about leaving development as well, but what are the alternatives? Going into management? I don't have the experience to apply for such a position at another company and I don't see this happening at my current employer because we're rather small. Similar to you, I lost my motivation over the years and find it hard to justify learning new stuff (like Ruby, Rails, Python, node.js, maybe Cocoa development, etc.) because it'll go out of fashion soon again anyway and takes me considerably more time to digest than those prodigy developers the internet seems to be full of. But maybe, things aren't like they appear. What's the percentage of rockstar developers among all developers? It's most certainly not close to 90% as the internet and all the cool blogs make us think ...
Sorry I couldn't be of more help, just wanted to let you know that there are others out there in pretty much the same situation. All the best!