I agree with everything in your first paragraph and would add the following: parsing is overrated. It's interesting the way that crossword puzzles are. Nothing wrong with that, but it can be a distraction; it's just not that deep a space.
That's not to say that the people who worked out how to do it in the first place weren't brilliant. They were, and it was a hard problem. But it's a solved one.
There are still some fairly hard problems in parsing. For example, doing minimal work to convert a series of text deltas into abstract syntax tree deltas, using caching to avoid throwing away too much. This is highly relevant to IDEs for providing code completion and other analysis, but it's usually solved with a mix of brute force - restarting the whole parse from the top - and trickery, such as skipping uninteresting function bodies, or parsing a much simplified version of the language that ignores many productions.
I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree with your assessment of parsing as a field in 2011. There are still a lot of unsolved problems going forward --- see Laurence Tratt's excellent article on the subject for a few details: http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/parsing_the_s...
I don't know. Barrkel's example seems better to me because there's an obvious practical need for it. The trouble with most of the work on parsing I see is that it's just not hard to hand-write a parser. I used to avoid doing so, and then I wrote one and was surprised: once you factor in error-handling and whatever other meaningful output your system may need from its parser (e.g. text extents for ASTs), the overall complexity of a hand-written one can easily be less than one made with tools at a supposedly higher level of abstraction. And that's not counting the time it takes to learn the tool (which is not trivial, as they don't always have good debugging support) or the complexity cost of having the tool in one's stack (also not trivial, since they typically have their own languages, complicate the build process, and so on). This experience led me to mentally discount the whole field, hence my perhaps overly dismissive comment.
That's not to say that the people who worked out how to do it in the first place weren't brilliant. They were, and it was a hard problem. But it's a solved one.