I work in C# quite a few days a week, and I share your pair regarding the simplest thing. We have a couple of astronaut architects on the team (both of whom are actually good programmers, but they tend to get starry-eyed about MS frameworks and patterns), and I have trouble understanding why even a relatively "simple" web application requires nearly 30 Visual Studio projects.

Personally, I don't mind C# much (I do work at an MS-centric shop), but some of the baggage that comes along with the .NET framework can get bothersome.