Question: How does one go about building a page in wordpress that contains a contact form full of custom fields, boxes, inputs, etc. completely determined by the author of the site. It seems odd that wordpress currently lacks this feature, but knowing the wordpress community, it's unlikely that we must do without.

Answer: 
[Contact Form 7](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/) is one of the most popular plugins to add a contact form to a WP blog. It supports multiple contact forms and you can add/remove fields as needed. Additional services such as reCAPTCHA and Akismet can be added. I use this on most of my blogs to power the contact features.
Add me to the Gravity Forms supporters list. Of course it does a lot more than just contact forms. You should definitely check out the feature list and decide if it is worth your $39 dollars. It was a no-brainer for me and I bought the unlimited site developer license. The time that it saves me makes it worth it.