On the other hand, historically (and as the parent you're replying to points out), many compiler texts have spent a MAJORITY of their time on parsing, and rush through the actual interesting parts of compilation.

> I would love a book that goes into detail about different parsing techniques and considers best practices and patterns and tradeoffs/design considerations -- would pay good money for that

Terrence Parr's "Language Implementation Patterns" spends quite a bit of time on parsing, and parse tree->ast conversyions.