I am not arguing that you should elimate novelty completely. Just that the amount of time you have to learn new things is limited and needs to deliver returns.

I am not arguing that you should elimate novelty completely. Just that the amount of time you have to learn new things is limited and needs to deliver returns. Take the iOS app development. Consider someone who has never used Objective-C but has lots of experience doing client side web development. It would probably be faster for them to develop using a tool like Phonegap and use existing skills. It is theporetically sub-optimal to native code but surely the time spent learning phone gap will produce faster results than trying to learn an entirely new stack.