"I will remain skeptical of naysayers who say planets are rare. We need a broad statistical survey like Kepler before we can tell with any degree of certainty."
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Could not agree more with your attitude towards Kepler and such, but your scepticism is more wishful thinking. We have now surveyed HUNDREDS of stars and less than 10% of them have Saturn mass planets or larger, out to around 4 AU. This does indicate that planets are likely NOT normal. Another decade of these surveys and Kepler-like missions (which somehow never get funded) will provide a more reliable answer. But the 1st evidence is against planets as commonplace.

Not only that but well over 90% of the ~60 planetary systems detected show wild elliptical orbits, not the circular orbits of our rarer still solar system.

-philw (the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be)