Hm, I don't remembering the "for free" argument in your article :) (but might've read over)

I completely agree with your point on learning other languages and frameworks, btw - the story on your journey was an interesting read. I'm just a bit staggered on how your journey ends with you choosing what I consider to be vastly less powerful tools (e.g. vim) when you know that there's tooling out there that, well, in my opinion is just plain better.

If money is really the main argument, then, well, fair enough. Even then I'd choose Java, once again for the refactoring/maintainability support, but people have called me an idiot for less so I guess that's just me :)