Thats not to say there isn't neat stuff to do at Def Con (I've seen plenty of neat talks) but its mostly a big party. There's nothing really scary going on there.
I had exactly the same impression - mostly a lifestyle / social / political thing, pretty light on in the way of talks with actual technical detail. Kind of like TED talks - well presented, entertaining, but not really actionable.
In years gone by, I went to some excellent events, with talks on really specific, useful things (kernel internals, gdb use, ELF dynamic loading, ltrace / strace use, that kind of thing). Can't help but wonder if those sorts of conferences still exist, or the whole scene has changed into something less practical and more lifestyle.
Maybe they don't do a lot of talks on the intricacies of C anymore (which is a bummer) but there is still a lot of technical knowledge going down at these events. I had s great time and learned so much
https://xi.hope.net/schedule.html#-coding-by-voice-with-open...
There was definitely some good stuff, just seemed to me that overall, the mix of practical/technical vs cultural/lifestyle/political at events like this has changed a lot over the years. Either that, or my perception has changed, it's hard to tell.
Just to add to your point, I suppose.
Many I know in this group of people (DefCon/HOPE attendees) do things like trade around craigslist-cash-purchased laptops.
At volume. But if you only need one (or ten), assuming your time has some non-trivial value, it's much cheaper to just buy off the shelf.
http://www.freetronics.com.au/products/leostick
...and stick it inside a generic keyboard (which has plenty of room).
I always thought that the fact that big corporations hand out the same keyboard to everyone enables these sorts of attacks. Any would-be spy could just make a handful of hardware key-logging generic HP and Dell keyboards and easily swap out any given keyboard at any given big company without having to even think.
I never use my employer's provided mouse/keyboard combo. Mostly because they're always absolute crap but also because I want to give any potential attackers a hard time. I can only imagine the look on some attacker's face when they show up at my desk and see custom hardware everywhere =)
Last time I went most of the interesting Blackhat talks were getting re-run at Defcon, so really not a lot of point in paying out for the Blackhat option, just go to Defcon and see them there.