I agree with everything you said but I would take it even further. One doesn't even have to go to chemistry or finance to find better things to invest time in

I agree with everything you said but I would take it even further. One doesn't even have to go to chemistry or finance to find better things to invest time in than learning new tools. There are plenty of areas within the domain of computer science/software engineering/hacking that are more worthy of effort than learning a new programming language (let alone a new text editor or version control system.) How about learning how to write code that matches regular expressions in guaranteed linear time. Or implementing a compiler. Or looking at the networking protocols used by QuakeWorld and how they are different from the protocols used by the original Quake and why. I'm not against learning new programming languages. Everyone should learn a few different languages. I just think many people fetishize them out of proportion.