I read your posts because you have solid structural thought, credible insights and good gut-instincts; forget about the fact that you are a Microsoft guy. I keep pinging you (in this forum) to consider exactly these topics. Take a step back and consider this:

We open source guys don't agonize over stuff like relearning skills we already have. A good example would be the Python language: features are baked in over the course of 20 years and they have suitable foundations from which to build on them for years to come. Therefore we can learn a language and rely on it to be there for decades.

The "other" method is attempting to push a language to market within the constraints of a rushed deadline; corporations are always trying to 1-up each other every release cycle providing half-backed "now" solutions.

Move back from the dark side and when you pickup skills, you'll have them forever. Once you've acquired a skill, you can rest assured that those holding computer science degrees have requested rigorous public reviews of their concepts (Python, Ruby, HTML, etc); IE: they were not hatched as proprietary concepts only seen by a few internal employees before approval, then pushed hard to market.

One key benefit of open source (anything; html, javascript, css, vim - anything) is that once you have gained a skill set, their yours - forever. In 30 years, you could go through this cycle of having to re-learn newer ways of doing what you already know - probably 4 or 5 times. While we, on the other hand, will be chugging along with the methods that are already 30 years old now.

Do you want to spend your time relearning new tools designed to help you perform the same old tasks or would you rather be chasing the kids around the back yard?

I haven't given up on you buddy - we will get that soul cleaned.