Does an impending skills shortage pose a threat to Drupal's progression?

Without a doubt the uptake of Drupal in the past 12 months has been exceptional, as a consultancy we are being approached on a regular basis regarding projects that are either Drupal based or perfect for Drupal. As a recruiter over 65% of the roles we are approached to fill are open source, with a large number being Drupal based. It seems that every other day a large scale site is announced, only yesterday Dries was tweeting about the New York Stock Exchange moving to Drupal. Good news for all concerned! There's a buzz in the community.

However, is there a bump in the road ahead? We are finding the uptake in the development community to be behind the curve. There are not enough Drupal developers with the relevant skills to maintain the progression of Drupal at it's current rate. Basic economics tells us that if a commodity becomes short in supply and demand is high the price of that commodity will go up. If the price of developers increases then so does the price of any Drupal related project, which will lead to Drupal projects being cancelled, or alternate solutions found.

It's that, or companies will take on developers with lesser skills, ultimately leading to lower quality Drupal installations. Does this have the potential to tarnish Drupal's reputation?

I am interested to hear views from the Drupal development community. Do you agree with the above? Are you aware of developers actively looking to move into Drupal? Do you think more needs to be done to actively increase the Drupal skills base, as a corporate company such as MS would do? ..... Or, is everything just fine as it is?

This discussion will be running in parallel on the Drupal Contractor UK LinkedIn group and our twitter @gonnadoo.