The company names on the badges would be great, sure. That's about as far as I'll go in agreeing with you.
If you wanted face time with specific people, then be responsible for your own business and schedule appointments. I did. I missed a bunch of partys and seminars cause I went out with certain people that I needed to talk to. Some were planned in advance, some were last minute deals. If you already know WHO you're looking for, how can it hard to find them? People don't hide in this industry. If you wanted to talk to let's say Karl from PrivateFeeds, you could've emailed him before hand, send an email to the webmaster email address if you couldn't find any contact info anywhere and try to set something up. anything.
The price. I come from the Gaming industry as a background. Our big expo is
E3 which is HUGE. And for the price of $550, you get passes to seminars and the show. No drinks. No food. I say go work in mainstream. $125 is a good price and if you find that steep, and feel like you can't make that money back during the show in contacts, I feel real sorry for you guys. We're not a big company, we're very small, but we had to make this show. It's the cost of business. As a local company, you didn't have to pay for a hotel, for a flight, none of that stuff.
The seminars. Wow. ok. Did you expect everybody to come up there and say "Ok, this is how you can make $3M in 1 year" and break down a business plan for you? They're all introductory and personally, I'm amazed Mark Tiarra from LUMYR gave THAT much information.
I say sharpen your networking skills. I always go into trade shows with a base idea of what we're looking for. What is it that I need to find? Do I need a live feed? fresh content? traffic? SEO? whatever my real major goal is. And usually I find it by talking to people that I never met.