Agreed - and in my day job, too, where my boss needs to present an experience that will have the highest chance of converting customers with a limited resource (my time) it doesn't make sense to spend 4x as long to make it play on IE6 when the return on that investment simply won't materialize.
I already make compact web sites compared to my peers -- no jQuery, optimized images, mostly text-driven. No JS is required to navigate and view the site. A hair over 100 kb for most of sites, including blog and header image. I use global CDNs. So my sites are friendly to users in developing countries, as long as they don't use Opera Mini.
There's nothing "bleeding edge" about supporting JS and CSS that IE8 supports. That's as low as I'm going, and no guilt about it.
By the way, have you actually tested any of your sites on Opera Mini? You may be surprised at just how poorly it renders, unless you're still working with tables.