Agreed. Application Architecture is far more important than Cloud vs. Bare Metal. It is just easier and more cost effective to through more bare metal hardware at the problem than it is cloud instances. For some this does make bare metal the better option.
To add to my previous comment though, AWS (and cloud in general) tends to make much more sense if you are utilizing their features and services (Such as Amazon RDS, SQS, etc.), and if you aren't using these services I can absolutely guarantee I can deliver a much lower TCO on bare metal than AWS. (Which is why I offered to consult for them) I see this all the time. Company moves from bare metal to AWS as bare metal is getting expensive, then they quickly find out AWS can't deliver the performance they need without massive scale (because they aren't using a proper salable distributed design and can't afford to re-architect their platform)
To add to my previous comment though, AWS (and cloud in general) tends to make much more sense if you are utilizing their features and services (Such as Amazon RDS, SQS, etc.), and if you aren't using these services I can absolutely guarantee I can deliver a much lower TCO on bare metal than AWS. (Which is why I offered to consult for them) I see this all the time. Company moves from bare metal to AWS as bare metal is getting expensive, then they quickly find out AWS can't deliver the performance they need without massive scale (because they aren't using a proper salable distributed design and can't afford to re-architect their platform)