I'm genuinely curious and I'm not being antagonistic, but why do you call them top-notch if they refuse to learn and shy away from a problem that should be (to them) relatively easy?
Someone are just the best programmer in Windows/Visual Studio environment. And being "top-notch" should not be reserved to only those who use command line.
I think he was referring to the "top notch" developers being unwilling to learn, which to me would disqualify them from the category of "top notch", no matter what how good they are at using their preferred toolset. I'm curious, if they are so resistant to learning new things, how well do they deal with changes in MSVS? Like for instance going from 2008 to 2010, the solution file format changed (and the importer is far from perfect), and things were moved around in the GUI.
Because you can't learn everything under the sky. Most of them are strictly Windows programmers, with lots of console (video game) experience. They are just not interrested in Linux, OSX, etc the way other people are (me for example).
What's the point for them to learn something like this, if they don't see how this is going to help them in what they do?