Craig,
 
Somehow, I find myself familiar with your comments, both analytical and historical (although I'm not sure why the S&W edition that features a forward by White's stepson Roger Angell wasn't more successful - this edition seems to have faded from the summit of the publishing pantheon).
 
But I digress. As is the case with other posts about this issue, you concentrate on the shortcomings of S&W based on your elevated position as a professional grammarian. What I'm trying to do is to call our collective attention to the fact that the great unwashed - specifically our students, their parents (the folks who pay our modest salaries and pensions), and those who presumably were our students but feel they haven't learned much - light on this book like bees to honey.
 
The reason why this is so, I claim, is that the GU (great unwashed) are desperate for somebody to tell them the proper way to speak and write standard English, and instead we deliver our contextualized, academic, conditional talk about grammar and syntax and tell the GU that there could be a "few" sections that might be useful. My observation is that the GU don't care. And that is one reason why, I think, we find ourselves marginalized. We focus on the ills we suffer at the hands of NCTE but don't notice that there is a huge audience out there who agrees with us that grammar should be taught, and yet we do nothing to appeal to these people. Instead, they turn to S&W, Grammar Girl, and other sites that offer even less insight than S&W

Geoff Layton