My company creates web pages (read: web systems). We only save time not using Drupal as our framework, when we are creating some kind of static advertising page. Other than that, no time saved. This is especially true for sites which are going to "stay around for a while".

So I agree with you. Simple web pages, no Drupal.
To sum up what kind of web pages I would consider Drupal an overkill:

A singel page with some text and/or images.

If the page was to look like this, I would immediately reach out to Drupal:

Anything else than the former.

"Drupal is a bear to work with, fickle, frustrating, and overly complex"... People say the same thing about politics, the economy, and most other things they don't have a clue about how works. Maybe you should take the time to actually learn how Drupal works. Yes, it's hard to work with, if you do not understand the concept of hooks. Almost impossible actually.

On the paper, yes.
But what about the billions/trillions(?) of dollars paid out to the holder of mortgage backed securities (CDSs), where the holder received 100 cents to the dollar of the face value, even though the underlying value was probably be closer to a few cents?

"the Steam Effect" gives us cheaper games?
Never heard of that before. My opinion about Steam, is that on the release day I can get the game cheaper at a local store, than buying it from Steam. 3 months after a game is released, I can always find the same game at my local game store for 1/3 to 1/10 of the price at Steam.
Electronic distribution is the worst thing that happened to gamers if you consider price an important factor. Suddenly vendors don't have any huge physical stock piles left in store, which they really want to get rid of. Only competition is between similar products, not similar retailers, so no incentive there either for electronic distributors to lower prices.
How do you get to the point that "the Steam Effect" gives us cheaper products?

For the last 12 years I've been working with creating web "pages" and ecommerce "pages". I write "pages" because some of these "pages" are some of the largest sites in my country, for some very well know companies. I've tested a lot of commercial and open source solutions, we even had to write an in house solution at first, because no good alternatives existed at that time. For the last 4-5 years I and my company have been using Drupal and porting over all our customers old solutions to Drupal-based systems.
Drupal is hands down the best framework we have ever had the fortune to work with. If you have to "mess with the core" in D6 or soon to be D7, you are really doing something wrong. Most probably with Drupal 5 too. Sorry!
And yes, you do have to write a module if you want to change a form or create a form. That's the beauty of it! Because, if it's a common change, someone else would probably already have written such a module and you don't have to do it, just download it. Besides, if you need to change one of the ordinary forms you most likely have other custom needs for that webpage and would most likely (I hope?) have a custom module to implement all these changes, so you just put your hook_form_alter function in that module.

So which framework / system do YOU develop in?
Would be nice to hear some advice from someone with such a wealth of knowledge as you must be packing... =/

Wow! That was stupid. Actually a bit retarded!

Would you say the same about cars, books, reading lights, washing machines, and what-not?

When you need a larger car, you send in $10000 to the car company and receive some new keys which unlocks the passenger doors? You save $20000 over buying a brand new car. Now THAT is almost a steal! =O
When you are almost done reading the book, you fork off some extra money to be able to finish the book completely. Saves you money from buying another book...
When the book you upgraded comes with smaller font, you shell out some cash to increase the power of your reading light? Saves you money from buying a brand new light. Or when times come to get a bigger TV, you just pay $500 and get to unlock the last 10 inches on your television. This is SO CLEVER!

Maybe you should unlock the rest of your brain... Maybe you wouldn't try to make this sound like something smart, clever, and beneficial for the human society.

That is so true.
Interesting thing with signed certificates, was that BBS (Norwegian: Bankenes Betalings Sentral) which is more or less the central point of all money transfers by credit/debit cards in Norway, is the one signing SSL certs for a lot of banks web pages in Norway. I would trust BBS far more than some signed cert from some unknown web certification authority, but... BBS signed certs would still show up in most browsers with "WARNING WARNING!!!"

What added security for any one person, does Tawte/Verizon provide?

For companies in Norway, I think a huge step would be to have Brønnøysund Register Centre issue certificates to every company or for EU, European Business Register.

30.000 USD ?
That seems rather low.
For Norway I've seen figures ranging from 160 USD to 300 USD a day per prisoner or 58,400 to 109,500 USD per year... =/