The problem is that the hand-waving could conceal a lot of useful variables -- and different people will care about different variables.

So one variable might be "time to customer value", and dynamic languages have been steadily dominating this space. But another variable might be "lifetime cost of defects" and static languages might come out in front by simply precluding many classes of defect.

And just like that we're back to trading off the long term and short term.