Sure and in a way we ended up doing some of that bar-lowering. However we could have done the same on the old niche stack which is what I used to do elsewhere. Instead of generic python devs 2-3 years out of school with 0 domain knowledge getting 50% more than starting grad salary.. you just hire new grads, teach them the niche tech & domain knowledge at once. Plus side is they are trained in "your way" and there's less retraining.

But either way, grunts depend on the lifecycle of the product. You bring in grunts to run the plant once you've built it. When you are in the process of building the plant you have a lot of dev work you want experienced (domain & tech) seniors doing. Foundational decisions and implementations that come from having some scar tissue in the tech & domain. Throwing grunts at the problem early will just allow you to re-implement your previous mistakes in similar ways.

And yes Python doesn't feel like a great system building language, it will probably be tucked away into the same corner as Perl in a decade or so.