Guess what - more and better regulations.

There have been low-level consumer protections passed but absolutely nothing like reinstated Glass Steagall or properly implementing and funding the provisions of Dodd-Frank.

Put mildly... bollocks. Point to some legislation that "keeps (banks) getting bailed out". You can't, because it doesn't exist.

Lobbyist influence isn't written into legislation. Favorable legislation for the banks comes over many years. For instance, allowing votes for Dodd-Frank to go through and then quietly defunding as many parts as possible. Politicians get to publicly say they voted for reforms while reporting to their donors that they've done what was asked of them. I mean, for fuck's sake, Henry Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs for 7 years, then became the US Treasury Secretary where he secured the TARP bill, then almost immediately left that to make more money with his Wall Street friends. We see the same with lobbyists at the FCC trying to destroy net neutrality right now.

Banks have not just been handed money to do with as they wish, they have had assets purchased from them to be held by the Treasury. Amazingly, doing this kept the financial system stable and stopped our economy collapsing overnight.

They've literally been handed money to do with as they wish, actually. The Fed has been giving free money to the banks with which they've then been buying US Treasury Bonds by the billions to prop up the market (read: not economy - the market). The bond market has been doing amazingly well over this time and it's served to increase profits at the major banks by leaps and bounds. The Fed is ever-so-slowly lowering this free lending but in the mean time it continues to falsely prop up the market. This can be clearly seen by the financial results of banks vs. consumer/worker results. The market =/= economy.

Leaving 2008 to the "free market" would have left the economy in a crater it would likely never have recovered from.

It would have been worse in the immediate and better in the long wrong. To say the world economy couldn't recover makes no sense. Do you think people would just stop using any form of currency to buy things. Everyone would stop having needs catered to by businesses in exchange for money or other goods and services? This line about going to some place we never would have recovered from is echo'd in many main stream media outlets but doesn't actually have any basis in reality that we know of. There's never been a society that we know of that literally died off because of their economy only and not just because of things like drought/disease.