I agree. Engineers are under educated. This is not going to improve.

Poor and middle class kids don't have the luxury to soak up as much education as they feel like before choosing a topic they are interested in. That is a privilege reserved for the wealthy.

We go to schools that are pragmatic, teach us some basics, and the get us out the door to do cog work.

Look at all of the comments you have drawn. Let me spell it out for you: your expectations are too high.

Society is not designed to create compiler engineers you can hire fresh out of school. It is churning out bright scrappy people who are hungry for class mobility, a decent standard of living, and an interesting job to smash their brain against.

Maybe look for one of those instead of expecting a perfect candidate to drop out if the sky. You have a cool as hell project so I'm sure you could find a brilliant person willing to learn.

The problem is some engineers are ideological, you don’t want to work with those. If you have this argument during an interview and the interviewing engineer is insisted that X is always the right choice, run away.

Anytime a commercial language gets bogged down in parsing, unless that is core to the product (and mostly it isn’t), also run away. Parsing represents like 1% of the work that needs to be done on a compiler, even if it’s an IDE parser that needs to be really incremental (the only worse thing is to get stuck on lexing).