It's sad to hear that you jumped into the .NET bandwagon that early. We only started releasing .NET versions of our apps with VS2005.The whole tenor of your approach seems to be that your behavior is astonishingly clever while others are necessarily deficient. Gee, where have I encountered that before? ;-)
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps NET has matured to the point where your VS2005 stuff won't be rendered uneconomic/uncompetitive by future improvements. Perhaps you're right that LINQ is a sort of optional extra. Perhaps your insight is so superior that you don't actually need to "dive in and take a look" at Linq to make your decision. I guess time will tell. ;-)
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1
