Why is everyone so afraid of progress and change?
Resistance to change is a fundamental human factor. THere's noting you can do to prevent it. Everyone has it, some people just in a more severe degree than others. .Net is one of the things that Microsoft has done right.
Well it's one of the things Microsoft has done [i]most[i] right. Unfortunately it seems like .Net is moving towards being a less compact API, which is somewhat unfortunate as it's compactness was one of it's greatest features. However the idea that threads should be methods (as opposed to objects, like in Java) is a horrible idea that they need to rectify ASAP. Oh and the long standing windows bug about only being able to update the GUI from the main thread should die a horrible death aswell. Truth be told, sometimes powerful software requires powerful hardware.
While that's true, a more important aspect is that buying a faster computer is several orders of magnitude more cost effective than optimizing code.