Interesting read. I know someone who's been a Salesforce consultant for several years. He was offered a job at Salesforce itself, but has chosen to hop around among different 3rd party firms instead. He makes an obscene hourly rate. Yet, every project he's worked on has had serious problems, and quite a few have flopped. I get the impression a lot of consultants are kind of winging it.
I don't know a lot about the Salesforce platform, but it seems like a lot of his clients want to customize the crap out of their implementation and not do things in the prescribed manner. I don't know if this is just stubbornness and stupidity on the clients' part, or lack of flexibility within the Salesforce software, or some of both.