I believe your request for stats was because you were using fancy CSS for sizing/positioning and wanted to know if the number of IE users was small enough that you could decide to just break the site for them and not care.

That is incorrect. A response to PM redesign: status update suggested I "stop wasting time on IE" and "If the IE numbers are low (and I sure hope they are), a link to google chrome frame is all you need". In the post you are replying to I said the following "Considering the feedback I have received to drop IE support, how many people are using IE? Android? and which versions?" I asked because I want to know and understand the audience better not because I am planning on dropping support for something.

"This puzzled me because it was in the context of you writing a "mobile" version of the site. I didn't think "old IE that sucks at CSS" was an option on a "mobile" device.

I am making a Responsive design for PM which uses media queries to resize elements to better fit the screen size of the browsing device. It is not about old IE sucks at CSS it is about how old IE breaks HTML5 which leads to CSS not getting rendered. I talked about these issues in PM redesign: status update and gave a follow up response to your (tye) question on using CSS hacks to fix IE that goes into more depth about the problem.

My feedback is to stop doing things that require a bunch of fancy work-arounds in order for them to work in IE.

I am using standard, validator compliant markup to build this design. IE is broken period. IE does not follow the standards and that is just the reality of it. IE 9.x still does all kinds of stupid things. Here is a very recent breakdown of how much market share IE has and how bad its standards support in Old browsers are holding back the web. Coding to the standards and adding hacks to get IE working is the best practice for dealing with this kind of problem. Numerous projects like html5shiv, Modernizr, accessifyhtml5, Respond, normalize.css and many others ease the pain of IE and to a much lesser extent other browsers as well. Then we have projects like HTML5 Please, CSS3, please!, caniuse, and litmus which go further in helping chart and solve problems caused by different browsers not implementing the standards. There is simply too much broken in IE to create a modern site without some hacks. More progress is being made.

The marketing department has been pestering me about that for months.

From wikipedia with my emphasis added: Marketing is "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." Marketing does not mean putting ads on PM. Marketing PM which helps society is not evil or bad.

I'd be more interested in heatmap testing after some actual competent design was applied to site navigation and implemented. Getting stats for optimizing a dysfunctional navigation system would help you tweak it to be slightly more effective of a dysfunctional navigation system.

Yes heatmaps tell us information about the navigation system but they do so much more. All clicks, mouse movements, scrolling, and time information are tracked. What if thousands of users keep clicking on a section of a page they think is a link and it turns out not to be? That is a usability problem. That area can be turned into a link to the expected content, it could be styled different to not look like a link or the general link style can be changed to be less ambiguous. This happens all the time in website design and speculation is not a good replacement for actual hard data from end users.

I agree the current navigation scheme on PM could be a great deal better.