I'm curious about how you'd easily setup this for yourself? As for the expensive, you can get away for a small team with something like 20$/month. 20$ is a fraction of what a software developer earn per hour!

I believe people are so 'ga-ga' (to use your term) because they keep it to the bare minimal (but good luck figuring out what that minimal is!) instead of adding thousands of features. We've been using basecamp exhaustively for a couple years. Is it perfect? No. But it's the best good-enough I've found to get shit done.