I worked at a place (but not on the team) where someone used the Ebonics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...) version of Lorem Ipsum to fill in a large amount of text on the app. They forgot about it and showed it to the client and it contained a lot f-bombs and n-words.
It seems like people need to learn the hard way to not put that stuff in. If it's there, it'll be accidentally shown to the wrong person.
Yes, 64 bit would be nice. There are a lot of complexities that go along with that though. No plugins would work. There is a reason that browsers aren't 64 bit and flash will never be updated to 64 bit.
It's possible, just a ton of work, and everyone will have to come along. This was a huge issue with Vista. MS introduces a new way of doing thing, and all the software vendors don't update their drivers to work with it, and now it's MS's fault for having a crappy OS. They will need to make the transition at some point, and the sooner the better IMO.
So I agree with you, but someone on your project should have started refactoring before it got out of hand. Yeah, hindsight is 20/20, and this happens to most projects at corporations. The business doesn't want to pay for something that doesn't make them money. What they never realize is how much money it will save them down the road. One team I was on built in 1/4 of our sprint time dedicated to refactoring things. It was just a part of the business cost so they didn't have to know or worry about it. It worked pretty well for the most part.
Why combine? Because the server side infrastructure is a lot more flexible with MVC (than WebForms) and follows how HTML is supposed to work.
If you're developing an API or service, use WebAPI instead. It solves most of the issues people have with MVC. MVC is still simple and easy to use to create services with, and I'd still recommend it to people.
The reason it doesn't allow you to do JSON GET requests is because of the possibility of hijacking. http://haacked.com/archive/2009/06/24/json-hijacking.aspx Not allowing this by default is a good thing. It will make developers look up the reason it's not working, and hopefully not return an array from the get request. They could have done a runtime exception only if an array was returned, but that's a matter of opinion.
I understand the complexity issue, and how large corps deal with that stuff... There are other ways you can chunk that stuff up though. Maybe you don't have a choice.
I don't think you can fault Visual Studio for not handling that many projects well.
I think your issues are the reason there are other alternative frameworks that have come out; and there are a lot of them. Use one of the alternative .NET web frameworks if you don't like MVC proper.
I'm not a fan a Razor either. It's code-centric instead of html-centric. Again, use an alternative view engine like Spark. I think a better recommendation is DON'T PUT LOGIC INTO YOUR VIEWS. You will rarely run into issues if you follow that.
Any issues I've found I have also found fixes for relatively easily. If you run into something that is a framework bug that you can't fix, call up MS and they will issue you a patch that fixes the problem you're having. MS has great support, so don't be afraid to use it.