I agree with you about maintenance costs being more important than initial development costs, especially for large systems. But I have yet to see any real study

I agree with you about maintenance costs being more important than initial development costs, especially for large systems. But I have yet to see any real study that proves your assertion that statically typed languages have a "major advantage" in this area. Got any citations? From my personal experience, the completeness and quality of the tests has much more impact on maintainability than the static-ness of your language. But to be fair, I haven't seen a study proving this either.