But one you can underpay and abuse because they are excited. The other has a lot better idea of what they'll accept and will leave when it's not worth it anymore.

Not in the same way… which is the issue.

It’s a skilled profession, so ideally you want someone who is more skilled, and the person who has interest is more skilled.

It works similarly with other skilled professions like carpenters.

Depends on what you see as "the job". I would prefer many projects to be better than they currently are, both from the end user and the developer side.

When I think about the projects I have seen, you need very good people to clean up technical debt in a viable and sustainable way, as well as develop in a way that is sustainable and maintainable in a good way long term.

If you don't have very good people, code quality devolves quickly, whereas the negative impact is felt a bit later, and at that point, it'll be hard for most people to clean up and improve the project in a reasonable fashion, and it usually never happens.

The skill, experience, and being able to grasp what needs to be grasped gap is one thing, the time people are in a project or firm is another.

In the end, it depends on what the job is. Sure, most apps work. But there are so many applications that annoy and hinder me as a user. Even as a user, it's a mess. I'm sure the dev team doesn't have it much better on those projects.

With very good people acting as mentors and guidance, others can certainly get the job done, and contribute in productive ways. Most importantly, they learn and improve significantly.

I guess overall it's not really about the big gap, but more of a continuum of skill. There's certainly a weighted spread though.