"carbon is old and horrible" saying just to mask the fact that they don't know how to properly malloc structs, use hash tables, or research through the poor documentation to find out which type certain functions take

I don't think it's an issue of masking, for the most part. I think many Cocoa programmers know how to malloc structs, research thin docs, and so on, but just don't think that's the way it needs to be. That's why we use Cocoa in the first place.