Or a smokescreen to keep the market balanced more in their favor...
But at the same time, if you need to go through tons of red tape (either from bureaucracy/processes or even tools) to change something simple this is a big demotivator (at least for me)
Last job involved C# and it was good, and dynamic (pun intended)
Java was the coolest / most hyped up language back in 2000. Was .NET even around then?
No, it originated in 2002, but the equivalent was VB, COM, and ASP. That said, I was speaking in the present tense.
In 2000 proper, the crazy hip thing in the Java world was J2EE. Seriously ... being proficient in Enterprise and Session beans got one a 100K+ job back when that was a big thing.