Are you suggesting that people develop two versions of their JS? One for IE and one for everyone else? Just to appease the pedantics of JS DOM manipulation?
For small bits of HTML, DOM creation/insertion is fine for reasons you have cited (attaching events, etc), but for a bunch of markup, sticking to your guns on this policy is going to cost you your job.
Making IE users experience worse also pushes people toward other browsers, which is a very good thing.
That is simply false. The average internet user should not have to make that leap of faith. They simply will think your website/app is crap and they will stop using it, because there's probably another product out there that does the same thing but actually works for them.
If you want to gain users and keep them, you do not make their experience intentionally bad.
When they come and ask why X is slow, we send them over to firefox/safari/chrome, and they thank us.
A) A fantasy land B) A college computer lab C) Develop intranet apps for a small company
http://tinyurl.com/d8nqu7 (Traffic growth)
If you work in the corporate world, then totally. You probably have to bend to IE's every whim.