If you have thousands of “expert beginner” level developers, perhaps a training programme would be a better option? At that scale, you would surely have the resources to systematically increase the skill level of your whole staff instead of merely trying to compensate for their current limitations indefinitely.
That is a good point but that requires either having training in place or having time to do that. The workplace I worked at had a pretty high turnout of developers and short term projects using various languages and technologies (our "expert beginner tools" largely abstracted that as well, thankfully), training them was not really an option (and we lacked the required infrastructure). It was an outsourcing/staffing firm btw, not a product company.
