As for salaries, I spoke with the Peering Coordinator community about this and there was some debate about this, with some claiming that once the peering is set up, there is very little to do, so not much staff time was required to care and feed for the session. The claim was that the NOC was capable of servicing the needs of the peering session and 2nd level support was already in place if they couldn't. So the salaries were already covered in the network engineering budget.
I think we are talking about two different things. I am aware of at least several networks pushing closed to 1Gbit/sec which has no one on staff that understands routing at a level greater than putting a neighbor section in a cisco config. Neither do they have understanding of diverse paths, geographic restrictions and so on. However, none of those issues creates problems since they are purchasing transit from providers located in a single place and sell it to the customers that take delivery of the IP on their terms. Should they want to move to a peering model, they would suddenly need to pay for people who know, understand and can deal with the operational issues that peering presents. Alex