IE is honestly not that difficult to get things to work in. What I always do when coding, is have the document opened in IE and FF at the same time, and as I save I refresh both to make sure there are no errors in either, and if there are then I fix them there and then.. Rather than going back after coding it and figuring out all the problems.
Firefox is surely a better browser etc, but you'll still need to make it compatible in IE as it is probably the #1 used browser since it comes already installed on a hard drive that has Windows etc.
Love it or hate it, without IE many front end developers would be out of a job.
Wrong. Without IE, everyone will be using Firefox and the world will be a better place. It's not like people are surfing the web because there's IE and if there's no IE they wont surf.
Remember that IE is still by FAR the most popular, so it doesn't matter what your opinion of it is. Alot of other popular browsers are based on it, so will act similarly. I know I usually optimize my sites for Opera in a similar way to IE an Chrome...
Lol, who doesn't. IE takes away so much time, I'm sure that if all the money that is lost due to the hours of ie tweaking would be invested into africa in form of food, there would be no hunger anymore