I'm starting to see why you bump into so many people mired in "yesterday's technologies". Hey, ASP.NET is full of great ideas, but when an end user finally comes to my site what's the difference to them between a site written with ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and SQL Server 2000 and something written in ASP 3.0, ADO, and SQL 6.5? Or, for all that matter, php or *gasp* Perl with mySQL or postgresql?

The bottom line is that there's no reason at all why there has to be a difference! Html is html, no matter where it's coming from, and I think you've seen enough complaining about the asp.net controls enough to know that .NET's promise of quicker sites doesn't always pan out in universally accessible, well-programmed sites. Why not keep on leveraging your "old" techs?

And all this jive the .NETters "expect" you to read. I've seen about 300 articles on the datagrid and goodness knows how many claiming to show how to access COM, etc, from .NET "managed code". This is silly stuff. If you've got a site to make today, why learn to translate yesterday's tried and true tools when that's time you coulda been spending speaking your proverbial native tongue?

Again, this is not to say I don't enjoy relentlessly reading .NET and C# articles when I have time, but I certainly see why people might still be using COBOL every now and again.