I don't know about that. Afterall, for a rookie team, it wouldn't be a "drastically different program[ming language]."
And anyway, with a decent default program included, and perhaps some nice comments it shouldn't be that hard to learn another language. It's just a problem of syntax afterall, and there's tons of resources available on the web.
I don't know why "smaller teams" necessarily imply a lack of programming knowledge. But for the teams that indeed lack a lot of such knowledge, they probably didn't use anything but relatively simple (or should I say basic) PBASIC. And remember that
is pretty much the same in any language (we won't get into the wonder that is Scheme).