While I'll agree that popularity is not everything, and that often people are stuck with overall subpar tools because those tools do one thing particularly well

While I'll agree that popularity is not everything, and that often people are stuck with overall subpar tools because those tools do one thing particularly well (php and application deployment comes immediately to mind), I don't think you can reasonably argue that programmers as a whole are so mired in institutional inertia that they can't move to things that are better for them within a relatively fast timeframe. The rapid adoptions of, for example: C, C++, Perl, Java, Python, and Ruby make it painfully obvious that that's not the case.