You don't hate ASP.NET, you seem to hate WebForms and for very good reasons. You don't have to use WebForms though, there are other toolkits available. In fact, I built a neat desktop application using ASP.NET stack once - you can embed it into any .NET process to neatly handle HTTP requests.

One huge advantage of ASP.NET is that it is crazy fast. After a while it generates native-code assemblies and you're basically looking at C/C++ speed when handling requests.

You can get yourself one of those newer (and cheap) dual-CPU quad-core servers with 8GB of RAM and this machine will handle some serious load (enough for most applications). This will allow you not to mess with distributed stuff and keep your stuff in RAM in between requests. Such setup will be an equivalent of a farm of RoR machines with MUCH smaller load on DB layer.

Of course, it doesn't apply to high-traffic projects like Twitter/Facebook, etc.

Ive also tried the MVC framework. It is a huge improvement over WebForms as it neatly addresses complaint #1, but it completely fails to address complaint #2. It is also beta software under heavy development and rapid change.

That said, Linq to Sql ROCKS MY WORLD. Maybe a more mature MVC framework and better Visual Studio support will join forces with Linq to swing me back to ASP.NET

I'm confused about the "crazy fast" comment. I'm a big believer in C#'s great performance, but ASP.net is super slow for me on every machine I have ever tried. Hell, every Microsoft site I can think of feels slow on round trips. Something is very very wrong...

I've always thought that ASP.NET was an attempt to get MFC programmers building web applications while avoiding re-training them on how to build web applications.

It is. They came up with the WinForms/WebForms abstraction to make building a .net desktop app or web app seem pretty much the same