Those charts of "simulated" load balancing strategies don't look at all reasonable at first glance. You certainly don't see such spiky patterns with normal web loads. I think you'd have to have some crazy amount of std. dev in completion time cranked way, way up in your simulation before you saw a bunch of servers stacked at 30 with others at 1.

It's not that there is no benefit to better balancing, it's just that I've never seen it have anything close to that impact. It seems like it's only being perceived as a problem here because somebody drank too much of the (old) kool-aid.

Some of the other numbers are hard to take at face value as well. 6000ms avg on a specific page? If requests are getting distributed randomly shouldn't all your pages show a similar average time in queue? Sounds more like they're using a hash balancing alg and the static page was hashing on to a hot spot.