There are many programmers out there who have very little knowledge of software outside of their own particular world, e.g. Windows IDE tools or commercial Java tools. To them, everything else sounds hardcore and old school, especially things like open source and command-line tools. I remember talking to a Java guy at a CMS conference who seemed very surprised that "people still use Perl" because he assumed the entire world was written in Java now.

I've worked in Java environments where people lived in slow and painful GUI tools and feared opening up text files. They had very little concept of how the tools they were using worked. If that's the alternative, it's much better to be old school. It allows you to understand what's going on instead of treating development like a black box.

Also, if you look at all of the most interesting and innovative websites, none of them were built with something like Adobe AIR. So, again, better to be old school if it means you have a better chance of inventing the new school.