I used to think similarly, but I've been mostly unable to find any real advantages to fluency in difficult foreign languages.  NB: I don't want to work for the government or doing outsourcing, the two obvious places to use foreign language skills.  So, this is at least partly my own desires, but I think my point hold: I see <i>very</i> slim returns to the time spent learning another language to fluency.  Far better to spend that 2-4 thousand hours on programming, math, etc.