But I would say that if Linq is as good as some of the MVPs are saying, having thousands of man-hours of previous investment may not feel all that clever. ;-)

I think thousands is a bit of an overstatement. ;)

Reductio ad absurdum....there were VFP folks writing SOAP code and other code long before later versions made it a little easier....does that mean the extra effort they had to put in made them feel less then clever in later years???

Same thing applies for capabilities in T-SQL 2005...prior to that, people wrote more lines of code to solve a problem, and then moved on.

The list goes on and on....