You assume too much - disappointing. I was in the .NET world for 12-13 years and worked for MS at one point. I was hardly being 'forced' to use it - instead I was regularly brought in to come in and fix / re-architect others' awful messes.

We both know it's not right to load 34 projects into a solution. It's not something I'd ever do, but it's done by many. I saw it commonly in my clients. My last .NET project I took on about 18 months ago, my client had a Classic ASP/2.0/3.5 chimaera with 50+ solutions, each with up to 40 projects in each. DataSets calling SQL Server stored procs for a data layer. The build process took almost an hour.

It's common unfortunately. Big enterprise, old platform, cluster of code. I stopped using .NET because those enterprises have no desire to fix it.