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If there is one thing I hate about English, it's its sometimes arcane grammar.

For example: subjunctive mood. For most verbs it's simply the basic form of the verb. However, as is common with English, the most common type of word is also the most complex. The copula/linking verb, "to be", has a ridiculously complex subjunctive.

Past first- and second-person subjunctive is "were", third-person is "was", present is "be"... Does anyone know what the deal is?

I know it's for hypothetical situations, so therefore used with things like "if", "that", and "wish". However, in some cases it sounds right, and others it sounds wrong.

If I were rich, I'd be happy. (Although fallacious, it is and sounds correct.)
If I be rich, I am happy. (Apparently correct, although it sounds like it should be: If I am...)

Am I misreading my sources, or has education really become so atrocious that even correct things sound horribly, horribly wrong?

Well, I know all this. Pronouns are declined, and thus have accusative cases, and the copula only deals with nominatively cased nouns.

If you read to the bottom, you'd see there was a more specific case about the present subjunctive.

That does not answer my query, though. To my ears, use of the correct pronoun case and past subjunctive sounds right. I've been fortunate to have had decent English teachers as well as kickass Latin teachers, so I've learned grammar well enough.

I still say Latin should be required.

The question, I suppose, was not exactly clear. Yes, I included that bit about education in it, but it really referred to:

If I be rich, I am happy. (Apparently correct, although it sounds like it should be: If I am...)

The question, to remove any style: is that correct?

Even that says nothing of the subjunctive.

Perhaps the subjunctive just is not used in such a situation. It works here:
"I demand that I be king!"

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That also doesn't make sense, since that would become "If I to have been...", which is just absurd.

Actually, most Indo-European languages are (if they aren't dead) steering away from the subjunctive mood, if I'm not mistaken. This may be a result of a continuing trend to excess and indulgence, but that's a different discussion I mean, sure, it exists as the most irritating aspect of Spanish, second to the past preterite conjugations of irregular verbs, and I'm pretty sure the French still like to piss us off with that nonsense, but I think the subjunctive mood as a distinct aspect of grammar is going the way of the passenger pigeon.

This would lead to the mood being devalued to dependent clause status, probably. Example: instead of, "If ye be gods, then surely ye shall not be harmed," one would say, "If you are gods, then you won't be harmed." Although it is less beautiful, and lacking in the same force, the message becomes roughly the same: If (A), then (B), a hypothesis.

We'll take another, less subtle subjunctive form: "Would that I were a youth again," would be, "I wish I was younger." Again, although less forceful, the subjunctive tense is eliminated in the latter form and the gist remains roughly the same.

I don't claim to be an expert on what may be considered an antiquated aspect of English, so what I say may be dead wrong. It's just my opinion that the subjunctive mood is a tense that might as well be just a dependent clause with the hypothetical, and therefore need not be guarded with very much zeal.