I was there, sorry I missed this thread or I would have tried to find you to have a beer. I attended on a free pass I received from OWASP and drove down on Monday. I missed many of the early morning keynotes (really sad I missed Jeremiah Grossman but understand it was very CISO-style metrics stuff) and with the exception of the Sourcefire keynote (which was really good) the rest of them were just silly or really bad.

I have to say though that given EC-Councils atrocious reputation this is what I expected and thought that it would continue throughout the conference. I was mostly there to network, not really for the content. The fact is though, regardless of how you feel about the parent organization and which side of the "They are a marketing organization" or "They taught me to be a leet hacker" fence you stand on there were some really good presentations on day 2 and 3.

There is some minor overlap with other security conferences but the biggest benefit of attending is the speakers who attend Hacker Halted are mostly a different group than your Black Hat, DefCon, Bsides, Derbycon crew. Some of this is because EC-Council is somewhat myopic and many of it's constituents are the same way but the end result was content I might not have otherwise seen and that has value for me. The quality I don't think is quite as good but to generalize around the entire org and say everyone with a CEH is a moron is really a short-sighted view. There ARE some smart people here, and there's some highly delusional ones as well. I will admit to being pleasantly surprised although my opinion on the whole about EC-C or the CEH has not really changed.