The complex features, lots of syntax and many ways to do things are not a problem for experienced devs in a particular language. The real trouble comes when these experienced folks leave the project for something more challenging and you start with newbie devs with no experience and they feel demotivated when they come across these tricky features and abstractions which requires months of conditioning. At that point, all you want to do is make a meaningful contribution in the reasonable amount of time increasing your motivation level. The beginning is the hardest part.
That is the theory, the practice is the factory factory pattern, design pattern books, code generation frameworks, IDE plugins,error handling libraries,... all to workaround the language limitations.
So when a new one comes into the project there is this spaghetti of workarounds in place.
