>Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter.

Have you informed them that you work with a high traffic site? Most intranet sites are not high traffic, so if they're spending time pre-optimizing for speed instead of features/development time, they're actually wasting the company's money.

And what has viewstate got to do with SEO? You lost me.

For SEO friendly URLs, all you need a is URL Rewriter. http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=a...

>only the people who knew internals of platform well could fix it

That's true of any platform out there.