The point I'm making here is complexity DOES matter. Length does play a factor, but if it's common words like you posted than that WILL be cracked!
We're not trying to prove that complexity doesn't matter, we're trying to demonstrate that the addition of a couple letters achieves the same result and is more easily memorized. Your argument that using words is foolish is off by quite a bit...
Lower-case letters: 26
Lower, upper, numbers, symbols: 95
So it seems like you have the upper hand, right?
Not necessarily.
Just adding a second character to the lower-case case results in 26^2>95. So really, while higher complexity is better for same-length passwords, varying length has an exponential effect because 26 and 95 are on the same order of magnitude.
Now you also say that using dictionary words is a sure sign of failure.
However, 10% of the dictionary is ~100,000 words. Assuming that the password cracker is absolutely certain that the password is a plaintext English word, which is quite a confident cracker, then a 3-symbol password is about the same complexity as any word, actually the symbols are more complex.
However, if you see that graph I posted, adding two, three words, has a huge affect on password complexity, it's the steepest line on the graph! So the password "busboys" has 100,000^2 possible combinations assuming English plaintext words, 26^7 possible combinations assuming lowercase characters. These are comparable to a symbolic password of length 5, which is not going to be as memorable.