the implementation in every browser which treats a self-signed certificate as coming from a known bad guy

Ah, you are a "self signed certificates should be accepted" guy. I very much don't agree there.

A self-signed certificate effectively gives none of the protection of a cert signed by a trusted CA so the warnigs areperfectly valid. Of course self-signed certificates are perfectly valid in specific communities: a company might sign the certificates for all its internal apps themselves and make sure their standard employee desktops & laptops trust their internal CA, or you could sign your own and have your friends and other contacts install your CA as a trusted one. But for public use they are simply not valid.

The commonly given comparison here is the way SSH works, but that is not comparing oranges to oranges. With SSH you also have some authentication credentials that have been given to you via another channel, with a self-sign certificate you do not. You can emulate SSH's "remember this servers ket fingerprint and only tell me if it has changed" in most browsers by adding a permanent exception, so it'll only moan again if the self-signed certificate changes. Firefox does this.

Having a CA signed cert proves nothing beyond that you gave some person who is trusted some amount of money who ostensibly verified something.

That is true, but having a self-signed cert proves nothing at all. There is some process (a process that has been shown to have exploitable flaws I'll grant you, but a process exists and is far from completely broken) to try make sure that the CAs that are generally trusted are generally trustworthy.

Renewals which exist as a pure profit vehicle for CAs

Renewals exist because certificates expire. Certificates expire because an infinitely valid certificate is potentially dangerous because the revokation process can not be relied upon in many cases.

... for something so much as an expiration date ...
Gee, that's a nice commerce website you have there, would be a shame if something were to happen ...

If your e-commerce site finds $7/year or the hassle of using StartSSL's interface for free (or $120/y or $70/y respectively for EV certs) a problem, then it isn't much of a profit making e-commerce site...

Charging to regenerate or revoke a certificate is just rent-seeking dick behavior

I'll say again: keep secure copies of the relevant keys and you won't need to use the regeneration or revocation procedures.

again, completely automated processes with zero human interaction required

Automated processes that rely on infrastructure that someone needs to create, monitor, and maintain. If you ignore the infrastructure creation and maintainance costs then yes the process is zero effort and near zero cost (just a little electricity for the CPU time) but ignoring those factors is simply fallacious reasoning.

If you so strongly believe that this is a complete and utter rip-off and that you could do it so much cheaper, why not do so? If you can do it as well while charging less (or nothing) then people will flock to your service. One man's margin is another's opportunity.

Why do I have to pay upwards of $100 for a wildcard certificate? They don't cost the CA anymore to issue or handle

That I'll grant you, but artificial market segmentation exists everywhere for better or worse (usually for worse from the consumer's PoV) rather than being a property of this particular area.

All so people who visit my website don't get scary and misleading warnings.

The scary warnings are not misleading in the worse cases. If a DNS hijack passes your bank's traffic through a server that has a self-signed certificate would you want your browser to warn you or just carry on because self-signed certificates are fine usually? Unfortunately there is no way to differentiate the bad and fine situations so we give the scary warning for both to make sure we give it when it is really needed.

If you can think of a better way then do let people know, everyone in the know knows the current arrangement way isn't perfect so a good idea well presented should get listened too if addequately explored and explained.

If what you are looking for when you refer to "people visitin my website" is simple anti-snooping protection (so random people on the same WAN can't see everything for instance) rather than identity assurance, then there are already moves in that direction. HTTP2, due to be submitted for approval in final form later this year, will use encrypted traffic in all cases in a way the ensures this level of protection (though I've not yet read into the details of these proposals myself, I'll reserve judgement on how effective that will be until I have) meaning that is soon to become a sorted problem if things work out as expected. For e-commerce or anywhere else where greater trust is required though, a CA-signed certificate will still be required because for those uses identity assurance is essential.