I have a lot of sympathy for that. But the end of that road is the 50-year-old programmer looking forward to spending the next 15 years doing mind-numbing maintenance on vital but terrible corporate code while hoping they don't get laid off. That's what happened to a lot of COBOL programmers, for example.

Software development is a Red Queen field [1]. If you don't take the time to keep up, you will eventually get left behind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_Hypothesis