Having worked in both dynamic and statically typed systems, I don't think this is true. A good statically typed language doesn't get in your way very often, and

Having worked in both dynamic and statically typed systems, I don't think this is true. A good statically typed language doesn't get in your way very often, and it doesn't produce any more boilerplate than doc comments do in dynamic languages. You do write doc comments, right? In fact, I'd say that most of the time, a good statically typed language does the opposite of get in your way. It helps you w/ refactoring tools, better intellisense and editor help, self-documentation, etc. The older a codebase gets, the more helpful a static type system is. That said, there are statically typed languages which produce a ton of boilerplate (Java used to, at least), and there are those that don't (F# comes to mind). The only dynamically typed language I've used where I didn't regularly miss static typing is Clojure. (Elixir may fit the bill, but the jury's still out on that.)