Have these people lost touch with the value of money? If Im paying $300 for one day I better learn a shit load not have to listen to some dude bull shit me about his "street dance offs".
I mean maybe that guys actually legit and is just trying to be funny. But im honestly frustrated at how expensive all these conferences are, for a free lance/startup person its way too much.
He is. He's one smart cookie and was the first person to be in both Ruby and Rails' core teams. He has some great talks up on Confreaks and YouTube, etc. He does like whimsy but that's what makes it fun and there's usually a serious and interesting technical topic behind the talk's facade.
That said, for people who aren't aware of certain personalities, I can see why it might be a turnoff, so more work could probably be done to explain why speakers at conferences are worth seeing.
… If you think $300 for a conference is absurd, then you've clearly never organised anything bigger than a BBQ.
Unless they were trying to capacity control, I think having dual types of tickets (some kind of $100-200 ticket with no receipt and thus no expenseability, and a $600-1000 ticket with expense reporting) would make sense, sort of like what HAL and CCC do.