In reply to Peter Knight.

Peter,

In general with me as a single data point, I have been able to make pretty good rates, but mostly because the people who hire us have difficulty finding people qualified for the more complex projects. Even so, many prospects who are used to paying lower rates for "WordPress developers" turn away because our rates are higher than they were expecting to pay.

As for Node.js, you may have missed my point. Compare the skill required to start theming or even writing a plugin to the minimum skills required to developer for Node.js. In my mind, those two are worlds apart.

One of the reasons the average Node.js, Ruby and Python developers are so much better than the average WordPress developer is because the former have to be a minimum level of good or they can't even build anything; it's a self-limiting criteria.

As for the JSON API being stable for years to come, I am not so sure. When it was first blessed as a feature plugin I voiced concern that it was being built prior to understanding RESTful web services and their use-cases. At this point I'm not 100% certain that hurdle has been overcome so I an tentative on it not needing to be constantly improved.

That said, I have admittedly not worked with it much on client projects so anything I say about it is purely pessimistic conjecture at this point.