I too almost went HTPC MANY times. The first was back when a 250 GB hard drive was $100 on a super special black Friday type sale. Ripping was slow too. Meh, I thought to myself, not worth the cost or time.
Fast forward to today. I still haven't done it, although I have made spreadsheets with all of the parts, prices, where to order, etc a couple of times.
And here I sit, on my 4 your old PC (my 1 year old PC sits back home... yeah, still haven't moved yet) whose hard drive failed a couple of months ago. I grabbed a 1 TB drive for it for around $80 and have tons of space. I've been ripping various movies from my collection so that I don't have to have a ton of them sitting in this tiny apartment. It takes me between 8 - 10 minutes to rip just the movie, and about 12 minutes if I grab the menus and everything too. Far from 30 minutes, and this is on old hardware.
Also, if I did make a HTPC today, even with how cheap storage is, I wouldn't rip every movie anyway. I mean really. Doesn't everyone have quite a few movies that are in their collection that they will probably never watch again anyway? Why rip those. And you are right, it isn't worth selling the ones that you want to rip. Sell off the ones that you will really never watch again (I thinned out my SD DVD collection about a year ago. Made about $4 per disc in lots of about 8 movies.), and put the rest on a drive array.
