You seem to be working in a company that makes decisions based on the availability of incompetents, that it wishes to treat as incompetents, and then justifies this on the basis of it being too hard to find and retain competent people. As a result when they get a competent person (you), that person finds it miserable and doesn't want to remain there. Thereby justifying their opinion that it is too hard to get and retain competent people...

For the record I am a Perl programmer, working with several other Perl programmers, and we do a reasonable job of having code standards. Plus we don't seem to have trouble maintaining an (admittedly small) group of competent programmers. (We are a small company in a niche field and our primary job is analyzing bonds - not developing software.)

Then again we chose people who were programmers first, and Perl programmers second. In fact we tend to hire competent people without regard to whether they know any Perl. We think we can teach Perl pretty easily. (And we don't just teach baby Perl either!) It is much harder to teach competence to someone who doesn't care...