I don't really understand conferences. Intellectually, I get that they function socially as a means of meeting cool industry professionals, potential colleagues and employers, and generally a format for networking. As an awkward human I find this aspect incredibly difficult, but I understand it. What I don't understand is why its necessary to couch this important social function in a format that revolves around people giving boring-ass speeches to a room full of people politely pretending to pay attention. It's like paying Dungeons and Dragons. I used to play D & D because I like hanging out with my nerdy friends, and that was it's important function, but the game itself was sort of so-so formatting to facilitate said hanging out, and frankly we could have done without it.
That is to say, I've never been to a conference that wasn't excruciating. Even the fun ones. I've been to Megacon in Orlando, PAXEast, New York Comic Con and innumerable book signings and none of them consisted of anything more than waiting in super long lines and listening to cool and interesting people say boring things. I've presented at Academic conferences on several occasions, and even though I am a polished and accomplished speaker, I still put a room of people to sleep covering the incredibly dry material covered in my Master's Thesis on modern Confucian philosophy. (The only time I have successfully been entertaining in the context of giving a conference presentation was when I was supposed to speak in Chinese about a serious topic and I decided "fuck it, I'm talking about Meatloaf for 20 minutes.")
So it was very cool to meet Jonathan Snook. I didn't really know who he was until Jason said something about him being a famous blogger. I also thought, cool, we get to hear about SMACSS from the guy who literally wrote the book on it. (Which, we got a free copy of his book by the end of the day, so WOOHOO). And for the first couple of hours or so I was reasonably engaged and interesrted (with occasional digressions into checking out the Suncoast Devs #event channel, which is sadly, as I am typing this still filled only with the chirping of crickets.) By lunchtime I was burned out. Because, no matter how cool or engaging or knowledgable he may be, eight hours is too long to listen to one dude talk. Personally, I think I would have gotten more out of the conference if, rather than sitting and listening to Jonathan Snook, I had been given his e-book and eight hours to read it, followed by the oppurtunity to go talk to him in a bar/party setting to ask him questions about his system cordially.
The point being that what I love about the Iron Yard is that 90% of the curriculum is "Hey here is this difficult thing, here are the tools to accomplish it and expert advice, figure it out" and that's the way I learn best. Lisening to Jonathan Snook talk for eight hours is not. So I'm glad of the sort of social and networking aspects of this conference, but not really looking forward to the rest of the workshop/presentation elements of it.
I think you hit the nail on the head for why I never pay extra for the workshops at conferences.