Econ 101
Sorry but the article that El Reg is reporting on shows a bit of self serving publicity.
Econ 101, that's the US Freshman course on Economics,
Supply and Demand will always drive the price of a resource.
The reason people who are proficient in technologies like Delphi, COBOL, and other 'dead' languages can charge more money is that the demand outstrips supply of those capable of delivering service.
It also goes beyond just knowing the syntax, but something about the underlying system.
And the author is wrong, that net new software is still being developed. That is if you discount enhancements or new code written for existing systems.
Why are banks and other large organizations willing to put up with this 'gouging' by the elder programmers?
Simple. Its the lower cost and lower risk alternative.
The plain simple truth is that those who attempt to convert, or rewrite new applications that do the same thing as their older mainframe existing systems, tend to fail.
Considering that migrations are expensive and do not yield any real 'net gain' and with large scale projects having a failure rate of 50% or higher, you have to agree with the banks.
So paying 2X for a single or a couple of resources is in fact a good thing.
If you want to see this change, then you need to change that statistics of high cost and high risk of migration. Until then... COBOL lives.