We are on the front lines but no one should be shooting the messenger. So please, be kind to one another.

People shoot some of the messengers because they are voicing enthusiastic support for and defending the policies that they hate-- in addition to showing a lack of understanding as to what it is that has people upset and why such as blaming our displeasure at the freebie thing as "finding change difficult" and in regards to the last two site redesigns that "it was too much change at once for us to handle" In addition to several forum admins stating that they (all of the admins) were accomplices (to TPtB) to this new rule about links.
Somehow I find it had to believe that UVDan was very supportive or enthusiastic about it, though (and I have yet to see him voice any support of it on the forums)

Well it costs money to run such a site, and if the profits are too small the site suffers. If they had huge profits like things were before, then why change them?

Maybe the big sales and huge discounts before the changes ran them down economically so that they had to make these changes, but a bad economy is something companies rarely want to admit publicly. If that's correct I think it would be better for a company like this that they admitted it, then people would probably be less hostile and more understanding, and maybe even helpful.

Except that someone mentioned in this or another thread that vendors have been losing sales ever since the Prime change (esp. since they no longer get 100% royalties for prime products sold like they did before the last redesign) The problem is that even if the big sales and discounts was unsustainable, what they are doing now is clearly even less sustainable than that.