Good question. Why isn't there more effort by the religious to actively discredit quantum mechanics or gravity? Why do they only ever go after evolution? Surely they must have issues with the myriad other scientific theories, right?

Without the proper base of knowledge, no matter how simply you try to explain something, the other person just isn't going to understand it properly. There's only so much that intuition can help a person grasp at something, and the more complex the subject matter the less the help.

Even if the person doing the explaining fully understands the subject matter, if the person being explained to lacks the understanding of fundamental principles, it would not be possible to explain the subject matter to them without starting out by teaching them the fundamental principles. If there is a large body of knowledge that lays the groundwork it will take a long time to explain before you ever even get around to trying to explain the original subject matter. Hence people spend years in school studying the fundamentals in order to be able to have a chance at fully understand the original subject matter.

Long story short, car analogies are shit at best and rarely do more than confuse people.

Except the fact that with IP no one loses anything when someone else uses it, and that any number of entities can use it simultaneously for disparate uses makes IP fundamentally different than physical property. Your claim that they are fundamentally identical is disingenuous as it completely ignores this fact.

Going back to the car analogy, if a car was fundamentally identical to IP, I could get in my car and drive to work. Simultaneously another person could strap a rocket to the top, get in my car, and fly it off a cliff. I get to work, they fly off a cliff and die a fiery death, everyone comes out happy. You can see how this just doesn't work with physical property and yet is trivially fundemental to IP...

In what way is .NET tied to IE? WPF doesn't use Trident at all, and that's the only thing I can really think of that might be in .NET that could be tenuously tied to IE. So what am I missing?

Unless they decide to scrap everything they've written with Gazelle, I seriously doubt Trident is going anywhere:

Excerpt:
Instead of undertaking a significant effort of writing our own HTML parser, ren- derer, and JavaScript engine, we borrow these components from Internet Explorer 7 in a way that does not compromise security. Relying on IEâ(TM)s Trident renderer has a big benefit of inheriting IEâ(TM)s page rendering compatibility and performance.