I dislike developing for IE as much as the next guy, but does selectively supporting browsers, even when reasonable IE versions exist, bring us back to the "best viewed in Internet Explorer" days? Is this a step back for web standards?
I'd say that anything that convinces IE users to switch is a step forward.
It sure does. Developers seem content to keep moving the goalposts and treating "inferior" users as slime.
You seem to be taking this rather personally.
In a way yes but there's a big difference this time around. You can easily get most code including bleeding edge stuff working in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Not IE though despite the major improvements in IE9. I'm all for ignoring IE just so that maybe Microsoft will catch it up with everyone else. That means getting CSS working nicely in it as well as adopting a faster release cycle and actually encouraging people to upgrade and stop breaking IE every time a new version of Windows comes out.
Not always. I this year spent several hours chasing down a discrepancy between Firefox and WebKit (Safari/Chrome) and I've even seen cases where Safari and Chrome are slightly different.