But if you choose technology for its intrinsic merits you attract engineers with taste, who have the drive and luxury to care about their work on a different level.
There are plenty more people who can't be arsed to or don't have the time or simply don't find it valuable enough to adopt "niche" technology, despite technical merits.
I don't think it has anything to do with smarts, but rather with priorities and human nature. Most people follow the mainstream because they favor stability and convention, those who break out in different directions favor autonomy and freedom.
From my experience it's always a good idea to choose a language that people would have to learn by themselves, i.e. none of the school languages (Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Javascript etc).
In that way you only attract people who do sit down and learn new languages by themselves in their spare time, which filters out people with less interest in programming at least.
