Take a deep breath and a step back...
It's bizarre how quickly everyone seems to dismiss out of hand the idea of actually buying the best domain name off the entity which was smart enough to acquire it first, yet in the real world that happens all the time. The best land was sold many hundreds of years ago, so if you want to build on a commercial patch in the middle of the business district, you'll have to open your wallet extremely wide and pay the current owner of the land so that they sell it to you. Nobody bats an eyelid, that's just how the property market works.
The domain name market in the UK is admittedly less mature than the property market, but it's been around for longer than you might think. When you consider how much faster the internet moves compared to the "real world" (it's like dog years) the names that were registered in the late 90s and early 00s are positively ancient by now.
There seem to be two basic psychological hurdles in play here:
1) "It's not fair that somebody's profiteering": it's legitimate (domains are sold on a first come first served basis, and always have been) and it's business, so get over it. That's like complaining that it's not "fair" because you'd love to build a huge shopping complex on the land under Harrods, but somebody is squatting on it with a building of their own.
2) "If it wasn't for that squatter, I'd have that domain name": no, you wouldn't, because you're not second in the "I wanted it" queue, you're 50th or 500th or 5000th - you just never got to see all the other people ahead of you because they didn't it buy off the current owner either, but like you they would have bought it had it still been available. If you're starting your quest for a decent domain name in 2011, you're so far behind the game that the players are already off the pitch and hitting the showers.
So once you can see past those false barriers to the reality of the situation, you can either go away in a huff and register something less than optimal, or you can take a deep breath and a step back and analyse the BUSINESS case for owning the best domain name, and the knock on effect that would have in terms of ease of SEO, PPC advertising savings, credibility improvement, simplicity of advertising offline, etc. etc. You may well be surprised to discover, if you can conquer the emotion and get down to the brass tacks, that the price being asked for that particular domain is a FRACTION of the benefits your business would gain from acquiring it.
And at that point, there's only one correct business decision, and it's not sulking...