The majority of people involved in technology are thinking people. Some of these people are part of large corporations which currently use IE6 because the cost of updating legacy systems is overly prohibitive.
They don't use IE6 because they lack education or intelligence - they're using it because the business case for leaving IE6 behind isn't as strong as the business case for keeping it.
It's not impossible to produce a site which functions well with IE6. Some sites won't need to consider it, but IMO particular types of site (ecommerce for example) must support it, because one single conversion can bring the parent company a lot of money.
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Practical steps that could help:
Produce your standards compliant site. Then, to deal with IE quirks:
1. Ensure you've used a resets CSS script - level the ground before you start to build.
2. Serve separate CSS files for IE6/7/8 using conditional comments, which overrides any styling that requires IE specific workarounds.
3. Learn a handful of workarounds to deal with problems you might encounter.
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If you follow these three points, IE really won't be so much of a headache.
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And remember: [1]
(Follow the principles of progressive enhancement: [2])
[1] http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement