I'm a little miffed as to why the latest version of debian as far as the dvd version comes as a set of three more than 4gb each? Can't I just download one dvd and have everything on that dvd? What's on those other dvd's?

Sorry Debian is NOT a compact distribution and contains around 19,000 packages which will NOT fit on a single DVD.
Most likely DVD 1 will contain pretty much everything you need but there are no guarantees. The rest of us with Broadband don't bother downloading the 3 DVD images or the 21 CD images, we simply download the netinstal.iso which is about 150MB in size. The netinstall will download the packages for your system as it installs the OS, and works quite well.

DVD #1 Contains the most popular packages used.
DVD #2 Contains the next most popular packages.
DVD #3 Contains the least popular packages.

Debian Etch offers over 18,000 packages. There is no way to fit all of these packages onto a single CD or DVD. That's why they've created online repositories and a netinst cd for the people that dnot want to download over 18,000 packages instead of about 1000.

A netinst cd will install a very minimal base installation. Only the packages required to run a system with enough tools to build onto it. The installer has the option to download your packages from the internet during the installation process. Even if you have a full DVD set, the installer will try to pull packages form the internet for newer versions.

A typical netinst cd is about 100-150mb. They also offer a business card netinst cd iso which is about 30-50mb. Use one of these cds if you can.

If you dont like the idea of netinst cds then you can very easily use only DVD #1 to build you a decent minimal system, then you can download the rest of the packages (if you need any) from the online repositories.

For my servers I tend to use all 3 DVDs, but for a desktop system I dont believe I've ever used the 3rd DVD. But I mostly use the netinst cds.