alt Hacker NewsGolang was created specifically so that Google could mitigate the downsides from lower their hiring standards. It doesn't have any higher design aspirations.
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." - Rob Pike
I suppose in a sense this is rejecting the "keyboard jockeys", but probably not in the way you mean.
You cannot separate the tool used to solve a problem from the problem itself. The choice of tool is a critical and central consideration.
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That's saying the same thing. If you give someone the ability to understand a brilliant language, they will turn their attention to the language and away from the problem. That's just human nature. Shiny attracts us. Let's be honest, we all have way more fun diving deep into crafting the perfect type in Haskell. But Pike indicates that if you constrain developers to bounds that they already know, where they can't turn their attention to learning about what is brilliant, then they won't be compelled away from what actually matters – the engineering.
Things are what they are, not what someone (yes, even their creator) says they are.
Unless you take a good look at the language itself, you will remain ignorant.
I think you're giving far too much weight to that off the cuff quote from one of the creators of Go.
Really I think it's more useful to view it as a better C in the less is more tradition, compared to say C++ and Java, which at the time were pretty horrible. That's my understanding of its origin. It makes sense in that context; it doesn't have pretensions to be a super advanced state of the art language, but more of a workhorse, which as Pike pointed out here could be useful for onboarding junior programmers.
Certain things about it I think have proven really quite useful and I wish other languages would adopt them:
* It's easy to read precisely because the base language is so boring * Programs almost never break on upgrade - this is wonderful * Fewer dependencies, not more * Formatters for code
Lots of little things (struct tags for example) I'm not so keen on but I think it's pretty successful in meeting its rather modest goals.