Air travel security is retarded - why?

[TheWorstPlayer]

Air travel security should have two goals:
- Stop people from compromising air travel
- Avoid inconvenience to people not trying to compromise air travel

Current measures achieve neither goal. Take, for instance, prohibition from traveling freely with liquids. Normal people want to fly with liquids (see: Michael Vick) and it is a relatively large inconvenience for them to make us leave toiletries at home, pack little baggies, take them out of our bags, not buy drinks before going through security, etc. I give it at least a 7 on the inconvenience scale. But what does it do for deterrence? How much liquid do people really need to make bombs? Seems like they could easily get around these measures by having multiple people flying and combining their liquids.

And if you think about the chances that a)there are terrorists trying to attack planes and b)they want to use liquid attack measures and c)they would not have been caught before the ban on liquids and d)they will be caught/deterred after the ban on liquids, I think it should be obvious that this is a lot of inconvenience for very little deterrence.

There are other examples. Would love to hear people's pet peeves on this topic, what people have done to make it easier on themselves, what TSA should be doing, etc.