I relate to this a lot. It took me a long time to discover Lisp and Smalltalk, and how far superior they are to anything I'd previously seen, because I was so busy with newer, more "advanced" technologies. I simply never imagined that the "industry" could be so massively wrong. But when you factor in economics and psychology this begins to look less strange. The demand for software far exceeds the supply of good programmers, so the industry is overwhelmingly skewed toward the mediocre to begin with. Most decisions about platforms and languages are made by managers, who look for things like "how many programmers can we hire" to maintain the million-dollar messes their large teams build. Then there are the vendors, whose job is to sell tools to those managers (which has little to do with making the best tools or even tools that work). Remember there's a clear precedent for all of this: COBOL, which for decades was by far the most common language.
There's another thing that cuts closer to home. Most programmers, even most /smart/ programmers, are intellectually conservative and reluctant to look beyond what they already know. The smart ones will happily learn something like Java Faces or WPF when it comes out, just like they learned ATL or whatever when it came out; that is, they'll upgrade to the next release of the same old same old. But most will never reflect much on what they're doing and only a handful will ever jump out of the rat's nest. How many of those COBOL programmers ever learned a new language? The vast majority simply retired. Yet I'm sure many of them were smart at what they did.
What all of this amounts to is a vast market inefficiency that will almost certainly be supplanted by ways of building software that aren't insane; it's just a process that takes decades (if not centuries - how long did the industrial revolution take to figure out how to really do manufacturing?) I see YC as a conscious move in this game. Given how soul-destroying most software projects are, that's an inspiring development - to see the balance shifting in favor of the creators.
I'm grateful that I listened to my intuition that there was something wrong with those "new" and "advanced" technologies. For me as well, it is the depth and simplicity of a Lisp, Smalltalk, or APL that is fresh.