As someone with around 11 years of experience in the industry I see similar problems. How do I convince people I am better at people with 5 years experience? I know I am better than I was 5 years ago. Mainly because I have made the mistakes, and seen more ways of doing things. I come up with novel and fast ways of solving problems in SQL, just as every company seems to decide they need MongoDB now. I feel the authors pain, but I am not sure what to do about it.
No one wants to hear about "mistakes." That might open up the door to the possibility that they themselves are capable of making... mistakes.
What people want to hear about are "success stories." You know, things that haven't had to stand up to that most unglamorous and unforgiving of tests... the test of time.
As in, thinks like nodejs, heroku, and ah.. mongodb. After all: Why bother with perspective and overview, when you can just pad your resume with... keyword fodder?