But you may have missed my point by a couple degrees. It wasn't that companies should look at initiative and aptitude directly. It's that those are the things that drive you to acquire the skills that make you good. Then you can prove that you're good.
How exactly to prove you're good, or for companies to tell who's good, is a billion (trillion?) dollar question that's in flux right now. But clearly it has more to do with showing work and less with weak proxies like years of experience (which may be years of doing things badly) or resumes (a skill uncorrelated if not inversely correlated with good programming). Since startups are starved for good hackers, somebody's going to figure this out, gain a huge edge, and pave the way for the rest.
In the meantime, training/retraining programs are not going to increase the talent pool much. Something fresh like Hacker School might, though.
Edit: in my opinion the eventual answer is going to be found by reasoning backward from Christopher Alexander's great question, "What feels more alive?" But obviously that isn't much help to someone in the situation you describe right now. So how did it work out? Do you like accounting or would you rather be programming?