I agree with all that you've said here, but the problem with relying on community to get the word out is that there is a "preaching to the choir" aspect to having community members try to get the word out. For Drupal to gain more traction people outside of our community need to be exposed to it, and the one way to reach those people is to use the existing press-release channels. As much as I hate to admit it, those channels do work.

*rant*And I do hate to admit it. It just seems wrong to me to have to pay someone to put something out over their system. This may have more important years ago when cross country networks were expensive, but where's the open source version of the news wire?*/rant*