"that cutthroat, weight weenie, aero-everything world of today" is what percentage of the actual market for bicycles?
You're confusing marketing with reality--the margin per bike on the low end of the market is so low that spending a bunch on advertising and promotion doesn't make much sense, so advertising and publications whose primary job is to get you to look at the advertising are heavily skewed towards the high end of the market, which is probably a low single-digit percentage of the overall market.
Where I ride, the weight-weenie aero riders are a very small minority, and they tend to cluster. They apparently don't even see the other 98% or so of riders, and think they're the bike universe, judging by the OP and posts like it.