Polling all Bloggers

Okay friends, I've got a dilemma here. I'm standing before an etiquette question that I've never been faced with so I need a little help to make sure I'm not completely insane. In the mail this week we got an invitation from my cousin to his daughters first birthday party. His first daughter had one of these and it was an enormous production. They rented a party hall there were probably 100 people there with one of the largest piles of gifts I've ever seen. We didn't have that pile of gifts at our wedding, and that's not an exaggeration. Personally, I don't care about gifts or large numbers of people. My cousins seem to be somewhat extreme in both of these cases when it comes to themselves or birthday presents. The invite to the birthday party was no big deal. It was at their new house, and for about a day I'd considered going. The next day, we get another invitation from them. This is for a house warming party. I knew they'd bought a new house but I hadn't heard that much about it other than they paid $300k for it and don't have a basement. This is their third house since they've been married. Good for them. They're doing very well for themselves. Really, I'm happy. The invitation I'm going to type word for word, save for names and directions:

"You're invited to a house Warming!" (front cover)

(inside top)

"Gift ideas: Registered at Bed, Bath, & Beyond,
Pottery Barn
Gift Cards, or Cash would be useful also!"
(names and directions here)
"Main colors: gold, sage, khaki, cranberry
Furniture: brown leather & dark wood
Likes black wrought iron accessories"

Now, the RSVP is to their cell phones. Let's be freakin realistic here people. This is insane. Not only that, it's one week after their daughters birthday party, and one week before thanksgiving. Basically we'd be committing three Saturdays to them (I think today is one of them but you can see how I feel about it at this point) all when we're expecting our own family. The birthday I can see how they can't get around that, it's pretty much set in stone. To me, this other gift invite is a piece of shit. If I sent invites to my friends and family that said "here is what to buy me, otherwise gift cards and cash work great" I think my parents would shoot me and I'd have no friends. The only other time I'd heard an inkling about this is when we had some friends over to our house after we moved in. We may have even sent invitations. People called to see where we were registered. I thought they'd gone crazy. I told one of my friends "Dude, our wedding registry at Target has probably expired. We've been married over a year now and you got us a nice wedding present." Which he did. For some reason he had it in his mind that you're supposed to bring a gift. Maybe we messed up. Maybe we should have charged admission. I personally never in a million years would have dreamed of sending horse shit like this to my friends and family. Oh yeah, I should also throw in that they've been married for like eight or 10 years and this is their third house. So tell me blogger friends, am I insane? Behind the times? An asshole? Or am I pretty much right on target with the etiquette here?