I used to think similarly, but I've been mostly unable to find any real advantages to fluency in difficult foreign languages. NB: I don't want to work for the government or doing outsourcing, the two obvious places to use foreign language skills. So, this is at least partly my own desires, but I think my point hold: I see very slim returns to the time spent learning another language to fluency. Far better to spend that 2-4 thousand hours on programming, math, etc.