Disappointed about workshop, are all like that?
I understand your frustration, but workshops are not for seminal research. It is usually for hosting / presenting papers that cannot make it to major conferences or provide a venue for very small and specialized areas of research. This is not a bad thing. Especially in CS, papers that are technically correct and well-written sometimes get rejected in major conferences, due to the high rejection rates. In this cases, workshops provide a alternative venue to patent those results and lower the authors' sense of rejection.

Also, many research projects (in EU but maybe this applies to USA as well) have the obligation to organize workshops during the duration of the project. In those cases, it is normal that most of the submissions are from project partners. This explains the little "inbreeding" you encountered. Also, since each workshop has a minimal number of papers that should be presented, in cases of low number of submissions, it is inevitable that some less-good papers get accepted. Also, although peer review is still formal (and not blind to bad papers depending on their authors, as you imply) on those workshops, the requirements for presentation are less strict than major conferences and marginal papers might actually make it.

Are all workshops bad? No they are not. It is actually easy to tell them apart (most of the cases). 


Are they co-hosted with major conferences  
Do they take place for many years  
Who are the PC chairs (this year and previous years) 
How good are the papers that got accepted in the previous years?


All these four criteria are a strong indication of the quality of the workshop.

A general advice. Many researchers (not excluding myself) tend to overvalue their research in comparison to others. Since your paper also got rejected for the major conference, that also implies that it was not that seminal or exceptional (which is of course OK). To someone else's eyes the comments you make about the "other" papers might also apply to yours as well. So, talking about lame papers and workshops (especially if you express those ideas publicly) will not make you a lot of friends and academia is really a very small world.