@hominid – I build websites for a living. I’d venture I’m OK at it, meaning in this case I’m not building geocities sites for folks or anything along those lines. My target would be people who run their own business and usually have 5–50 employees.
I’ve built several interactive contact forms in the last year. The options are to either go back and forth via email several times to get all the information you need, or guide people initially so you can help them right away… hopefully making as much information optional as possible.
As far as the last time I saw a contact form, they’re pretty much the norm. There are entire companies built on providing effective contact forms and the processes behind them to make answering easy. I’d say twitter has some decent technical chops and uses an array of forms to contact them rather than email addresses. I like The Verge’s form as well. Amazon takes emails through a form as well (behind account login, so no link). Do you really think these are insulting?
As far as email harvesting, if you list an email on a page, expect tons of spam there. Spammers have spiders just like search engines, but they specifically search for emails, dump them in a database, and sell them. There are ways to keep it from happening, but the most effective is just not to list the email.
btw, gifs are back baby!