While I understand EROEI is a hard thing to accuratly gauge, ignoring it or calling it false seems like a bad idea.

The same applies to net energy because it is a similarly false concept. Why should we care about net energy when so many forms of energy are almost free such as solar, wind, geo thermal, gravitational, and nuclear which powers our sun and the stars. There can not be an overall shortage of energy in the universe as long as mass and the speed of light exist.

While there is a great abundance of energy in the universe, the problem is that this energy is not easily stored or manipulated.

Energy is undefined in EROEI. Energy is an abstraction like fruit, grain or metal. Some energy is free and some is expensive. To lump all forms of energy together is ridiculous.

The energy in EROEI is mesured in joules, the universal unit of energy. By using joules you can measure how much energy has to be put in, in the form of fossil fuels, to the amount of energy extracted, in the form of ethenol.

It is absurd that we could decide which grain to grow based on bushels of grain returned on bushels of grain invested. Or that we should decide which metal to produce based on tons of metal returned on tons of metal invested. Yet that is what EROEI and this post tries to do again.

The metaphors that you are using do make it sound absured. What if, though, it took 15 bushels of grain to feed your horse each year. You needed your horse to work your feild that produces an unknown number of bushels of grain each year. If you produce 20 bushels of grain you have enough to feed your horse and 5 bushels left over to feed yourself. If you produce 10 bushels, you don't have enough to feed yourself and your horse. You can not eat yourself and die. You can not feed your horse and he dies, then next year you cannot work your field and you die.

To me, ERoEI seems like the only logical way to look at fuels. While it is very difficult to put numbers on the exact amount of energy input needed to extract an amount of energy, I don't see any alternative.

It seems to me that you don't really understand ERoEI. There is a very good article on wikipedia that I would recommend reading if you haven't. Or, do you have some alternative method for comparing fuel sources?