You're right, I was putting words in your mouth. Sorry.

The argument you're making, especially by using market share statistics, is that we should all succumb to Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft's strategy with IE from the beginning has been to leverage the fact that the average user is going to be starting from Windows and Microsoft products and will therefor be more comfortable with, (i.e. choose by default) the Microsoft browser that comes with the operating system. On this basis, they believed that not only could they succeed with a non-standard compliant browser, but that the rest of the industry would eventually adopt their technology and methods as the standards, a strategy that Microsoft has tried, and often succeeded, with many products and markets. I have found that my websites / pages will generally work well on all browsers (Including Chrome), with some minor tweaks, except for IE. In that case, on the lower impact scale I at least often have to write separate CSS code full of IE work-arounds and on the higher impact scale I have to build entirely separate pages.

I agree, if you believe you actually posses the skills to do a good job with the projects (which after 7 months - as a self taught person myself, I have to be honest - is probably a stretch), start by doing the work for cheap,- cheap, in order to build a portfolio that will give your potential clients confidence in your work.