The OP states that web dev is overly complicated and broken. I counter that modern tools are far from being broken, and are infact lightyears ahead of what was available only 3 or 4 years ago. Not a refutation per se, but a counterpoint.

* elastic compute - easier - no need to worry about hardware * REST - easier - no need to worry about WSDL and XML * HTML5, CSS3 - agreed powerful standards to create create UIs * jQuery - much easier than hand-rolling * JSON - easier and lighterweight than XML * decent modern browsers - improved standards adherence, so easier and quicker to write for multiple browsers * NoSQL databases - easier to work with (no ORMs), quicker to set-up (no schema) than relational dbs