>>>they tend to approach every problem in the same old way, with the same old solutions.
I agree. It works in the software area in spades. There, some comment that a programmer can only tolerate 3 language changes before he/she refuses to change again.
I started in Basic, then moved to COBOL, then to Fortran, then to C, then to C++ and finally to Java. That's six, if something better then C or Java comes along I'll learn that too. Oh and the above does not count all the database access languages I've had to learn either. Happily Hibernate does a good enough job (most of the time) that I don't have to write too much JDBC, SQLPLus code as long as a plan my DB access requirements carefully first. The key being planning first.
I think you are full of it.