Could not agree any more strongly about this. You still need to use bcrypt to store passwords, because you will eventually screw up Unicode and SQL on a complicated form somewhere and give up your whole password database. But if you're willing to spend ever a quarter person/day on password auth, there is no economy at all to skipping SSL.
If you're connecting to a website that looks the same, but the URL is slightly different, it won't help. What's more, the URL doesn't have to be different for the entire user's session.
Could you explain further what sort of MITM attack you mean for which SSL doesn't help? (Are you assuming users who don't insist on an SSL connection with a recognized domain?)
