I would say that in my late 30's I was hitting my peak in terms of raw ability and experience. At least as far as ability is concerned, I really didn't hit a downturn until much later. Now, getting on to 50, I'm noticing that my ability to deal with complexity is quite a bit diminished. But my tolerance for complexity is likewise diminished. When I would have accepted a poorly factored solution, now I scratch my head until I find a way that allows me to understand it.

When you get down to it, do you really want to tailor your code base to the top 1% of coders? How will you sustain that practice? By paying people 4 times as much? Even then you aren't going to nab all the amazing people. Hire some people who know how to dumb down your code base. It pays dividends.