There is an old programmer joke that goes "I can write BASIC code in any language!" which is a lament about people writing spaghetti type code (which was normal for early programs in BASIC) even when the language supported much more elegant constructs. But the inverse is also true (although people rarely complain about it :-) since ultimately you're compiling into machine code, if you're writing in machine code you can write as elegantly as you could in the most beautiful high level code, its a function of the programmer, not the language.

There are people who write solid, supportable, code in any language. keep those people around as they will ultimately create the most code with the least technical debt.