I mean, if it's never really a problem, why spend more time setting extra things up. That being said, I'd have no problem setting up and managing HAProxy if we wanted to do that.
The fw boxes are from these guys: http://www.watchguard.com/ They were X550e's this weekend we're installing XTM 515's
I'm all for free, except when you're technically paying for it with licensing/etc.
I was totally serious about the $50-100 boxes being better than HAProxy, they're monumentally better at the basics. Where they don't do so hot is with SSL acceleration, but considering how fast AES-NI is, I don't bother doing that with loadbalancers anymore. Also fully HA and you don't have to deal with source/dest NAT issues if you're using DSR.