The Microsoft .NET developer community tends to believe that people within it are known to the outside. Because this ecosystem is essentially funded, there is more of a marketing slant, and Microsoft employees, as well community members, enjoy a kind of celebrity.
Cosign, I find it takes me the same amount of time to fold in a full theme into an ASP.NET MVC site using Razor. It's all just markup in the end, and whatever angle-bracket tax you're paying for server-side includes. Normally the most time intensive part is replacing paths to statics in CSS and HTML.
Great call on Themeforest. The added benefit of using a prefab admin skin is that you can actually build your entire concept before you need to think about paying a designer. Many of the themes have a built-in grid system (if they aren't using 966 outright) so that you can build UI workflows after creating mockups. I have made this mistake in the past but would now never hire designer if I hadn't already built a working prototype of every screen, and for that I use ThemeForest HTML5 skins.
An alternative to 99designs that I've used successfully in the past is BrandStack.com; you can only choose from ready-made designs, but they are high quality and the designers usually are willing to adapt for your branding. They also have Upstack.com which is a similar service to 99designs but you get a little bit more of a warm fuzzy feeling since it's not "on-spec".
I'm leading Postmark's API development. Amazon SES is clearly going to be the low cost provider; nobody's going to compete on price. Time will tell what their actual deliverability rates are, what their spam handling really looks like, etc. I agree that price is a weak argument in any market. Now that we're at bottom, we'll see lots of innovation in this space, and everybody will win as a result. We have a great roadmap ahead with Postmark.