Who Do Open Houses Benfit? Are they Worth It?

I know it's a great debate with in the Real Estate field on who Open Houses really serve? What does the homeowner really get out of being kicked out of their home for a couple of hours on Sunday? Typically about 1% of the time a buyer actually walks through the door and wants to write an offer. But we are talking about the "perfect storm" of buying a house. You have a to have a great product, a willing and able buyer and their worlds have to meet on a Sunday between 2-4pm. It has never happened to me and I have done hundreds of open houses.
At this moment I am a little biased because I am sitting at an Open House right now and have only had two noisy neighbors come through, I personally think open house are of no use. Our buyer agents get very few leads out of open houses.

Here is what we do to prepare for an open house...

1. Schedule with the home owner with in the first month of the house being listed.
2. Create and send post cards a week and a half early to three hundred of the nearest neighbors. ($157.00)
   
3. Put the ad in the open house sections in Saturday and Sundays newspaper. ($62.50)
4. Make 20 color flyers and sign in sheets. ($10.00)
5. Put the open house on three online open house websites.
6. Put out directionals the day before with balloons. (where allowed)
7. The day of, get there early (easier said than done) and sit there for two hours.

So, every weekend our team has at least one open house. We do all of this work, spend all this money, kick our "aggravated seller" out of their house on one of their days off. To return to frustrated agent with no good news and no explanations on why people didn't come or make an offer.
I really think that our team does such a great job marketing, that people don't come through our listings unless they really like it. We give each listing a Virtual Tour, Showcase status on REALTOR.com, post cards to all the neighbors, a flyer box out front and a whole lot more. So people can see inside the house with actually stepping inside, so that has to decrease the amount of traffic on open houses and showings. Do you think thats a good idea? Or should we not put as much out there so they have to come in?
So, the question of the day is who do open houses benefit? I would love to hear what you think, especially if you are a current, future or past client.