I don't think most people who bow to the conventional wisdom, willingly or not, believe that *they* are to stupid to use this stuff. However, they don't work alone--they work on teams of varying skill levels under management that has little or no control over the code or way to tell whose code is shit and whose is shinola. In that situation, it's good to have guard rails that at least keep all the cats headed in roughly the same direction. IOW, I may not think that I'm too stupid to learn this stuff, but I'm none too sure about that guy over there. And I'd rather give up the use of potentially useful features myself rather than constantly give code review comments that will be ignored.