I wish I started with #php back - I'd be much further with stuff like DBM and just overall awareness of how sites actually function. And it's really fun too! Feels like a great choice for my career moving forward and also building REAL everyday software in my spare time. Note that I am still really grateful for the beginning I had and I've build lots of cool stuff and a career on top of JS but I feel like I always wanted to become more of a "Software Engineer" than "Lang Engineer"
there's nothing wrong with doing the bare minimum (which is still a lot) to get you hired as a SWE but I treat programming more as a craft then just my job - I always look at complex software and ask myself - how did they manage to make this work? I hope to discover some of this "magic" pretty soon