There are several problems with how you're going about your PoV. (Though, naturally, everyone is entitled to go about forming their PoV any way they choose.)
Let's examine...
1.) You're claiming IE is the "Vast Minority" because 80% of people use other browsers. This position is flawed in that you're creating an "IE vs. Everyone Else" basis for your statement. It doesn't make any sense and it looks a bit like you're working backward from "I dislike IE" to "Let's take every other browser vs. IE" to "IE is the vast minority".
If 20% of people drink Coca-Cola, 25% drink Pepsi, and then an assortment of other brands round out the other 55%, are you really going to try to tell me Coca-Cola isn't doing incredibly well? <_<
2.) Again, you're using one site's statistics - and statistics are flawed by nature... especially when they're based on "our logs". If I based results on logs I gathered via my own endeavors, would you take that to be the absolute truth? Some have IE at over 40% of market share for 2011... why believe your data and not the other? Why not round off both and meet in the middle at least? (And in any case, we're still not talking about a vast minority, anyway.)
3.) IE Controled the "vast majority" for a long time. Are you really going to look at an achingly slow decline from "Super-Huge Mega-Monster" to "Normal Size" and claim it's anything other than an equaling out of the market? There were fewer viable options and IEwas King. Now there are viable options and IE isn't King. Anyone who thinks IE is dying instead of becoming a "commoner" is fooling themselves.
4.) As a webmaster (though not as talented as yourself) who cralwed out of the mid-90s Geocities trash dump, I feel comfortable saying with all the time/experience that making a website work cross-browser - even in buggy browsers - is part of the deal. The webmaster's duty is to create a site that works for everyone, just as the road crew makes a street that works for 1980s Sedans as well as Hummers. Just like programs should (ideally) run on computers that aren't cutting-edge top-of-the-line models... though of course MMORPGs are often the exception.
I don't know of any other business (off the top of my head) where there's such (present company excluded) snobbish and elitist behavior at the expense of one's own userbase. Everyone with an ancient copy of IE6 is a prospective customer, a prospective fan, follower, even a friend, to the webmaster. Can you imagine a film company putting their material out on Blu-Ray and essentially saying "upgrade or get lost" to anyone who hasn't upgraded?
And yes, it can be a matter of cost - even with a free browser. Plenty of people are on ass-backward PCs they got for their birthday six years ago, or simply can't afford to otherwise upgrade. As software progresses, these folks are often left behind - told they should be upgrading their software when they literally can't without purchasing a memory upgrade, a new device, etc.
Meh.
I miss the old internet, I guess.
