I think the real lesson here is developers have a warped sense of time and would rather spend relatively much more time building a website to solve a problem than it would just to learn it
That's right. There's already so much that engineers have to keep in mind when programming. The less new stuff (particularly arbitrary stuff) people have to keep in mind when building software, IME, the more likely the software is to be correct. That's why designers typically leverage existing conventions when possible rather than invent new ones. It greatly reduces complexity to bind a newish idea (e.g., a new syntax) onto something they already understand well. This is good because complexity is among the biggest enemies of robust software.
Not so much learn but to retain. Working in a web stack you end up having to juggle something like 5 languages at once (Your server language + SQL + HTML + CSS + JavaScript) not to mention these "micro-languages" like time formatting, imgsrc strings, etc. This is why ORMs and things like node.js are popular - to reduce the burden of dealing with a bunch of different languages.
