josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

It might be so, I'm not even interested on arguing on that since it's beside the point of this discussion. FWIW, you seem to imply something that is completely unbased, i.e. that ignorance and unwillingness to hire and take advantage of people with technical know-how is somehow related to success. Don't think I should bother to refute that.

Our discussion was on whether management in these companies is making an informed trade-off or if they feel safer stabbing in the dark, rather than going for the light switch. I don't think you've brought anything new to the table, other than your degree of confidence in your convictions which, I'm sure you'll agree, is not something one can argue against :-)

Besides, I'm pretty sure noone contested that it takes a lot of effort to build a highly scalable site, even if you do know what you're doing. Still not relevant to the discussion in this subthread though.