.>>.because of the amount of effort it takes to get the simplest things done, even if I'm using a framework (Ideablade) on top of .NET to make things a little bit easier.

For sure, it's a lot more coding, but we ultimately measure efficiency in time, not lines of code.
It's hard to measure time when you're googling every half hour to find out what something *really means*.
I've just finished my first bona fide income producing C# Winform project and my time to do the final simple mainteance screen was a tiny fraction of the time for the first one. The primary differences are facilty with the language and the IDE and the ability to reuse proven code that I'm familiar with and my ability to hide in class methods massive blobs of typing that would have taken a couple of VFP lines.
The code is still comparatively huge, but the time is now almost- not quite - as fast as I can do a VFP screen with equivalent functions.

Dragan mentioned COBOL. For a while I programmed VFP side by side with some COBOL/CICS programmers who could sit at a TSO termninal and knock off apps with thousands of lines of code in less than an hour by judiciously cutting and pasting from other apps that they had worked with every day for years.
Because of their extraordinary expertise, they could keep up with my VFP output without breaking a sweat.

As they say in golf, it's not the club... it's who's swinging it.