I do appreciate the viewpoints of the TSA folks who post here. I don't always agree with you all, but I do appreciate your point of view.

But let's get to what we're complaining about here...

1) Somebody has decided that shoes with soles or heel greater than 1 inch in thickness need to be looked at more carefully. Nevermind that plastic explosives can be molded to any sort of shape or that someone with size 8 feet can wear size 12 shoes. (I can see it now... "sir, your feet look too big for your body, please take off your shoes".)
2) Shoes are either profile or they are not. If they are profile, we're not worried about metal; we're worried about contents.
3) You either alarm the WTMD or you don't.

What people complain about is being told that their shoes are profile when they are not. Ok, I'll allow that some of this is a judgement call, but that's easy to fix. Just like ORD used to have the Boy Scout metal detectors for shoes (and why they got rid of them is beyond me), you have a self-service device that allows the pax to check the thickness of their shoes. That eliminates half of the arguments right there and gives pax a place to go back to prove their point (or TSA to do so).

(But even moreso, as many here have suggested, the whole shoe thickness thing is a farce. Bart, you were in the military, so I'm sure you played with things that blow other things up. You know this intuitively. Yes, we have a precedent, but we also have a significant point of failure in the system. The time spent dealing with non-alarming shoes is time that we can't spend examining things that are higher risks. Screening shoes is easy to do and, as others have noted, makes it look like you're doing something. But at the end of the day, it is a point of failure because too many resources are being spent dealing with too small of a threat. Likewise, the match and lighter fiasco that is coming will result in a similar -- if not worse -- point of failure. We're narrowing focus to something that is a minimal threat, yet we're going to have more resources deployed to deal with it. And adding resources for these two "threats" means that money will not be available to eliminate the need for manual searches by using the bomb sniffer technology. The solution is simple -- we have technology which can assure us that the person does not have any explosive material on their person, yet we're going to expend millions of dollars doing more hand searches and slowing down the entire process -- costing pax and airlines money because of missed flights.)

So a compliant shoe should go through on the pax' feet and absent a WTMD alarm, we're done.

I don't think anybody here has argued about WTMD alarm situations. Something has set off the alarm and the pax has been given a chance to do the TSA Macarena and figure out what is setting off the alarm. Could be shoes, could be belt, could be bra, who knows? So I think most of us, even when we have shoes we know have no metal, will go through the secondary process because something clearly set off the alarm.