Yes, the whole fights of people confused about "var" and avoiding it shows that a fair amount of MS's target group is simply not interested in proper language research or design. I'll admit that I love the ideas behind the CLR (the VM design is pretty slick, although it's stagnated the past years). I think some parts are really excellent (the generics), but when I approach a vendor and I hear they're using .NET, it is a slightly negative flag.

I too had a boss (new owner after acquisition) say "no you're not allowed to use lambdas".