Brilliantly written, very thorough. It's interesting that the 'little guys' have that "I love my users, and I really just want to help them" mentality so at odds with the big players (I'm trying to take the same approach with Twitterscribe too). I wonder at what size it flips around and users become the enemy, or at least, an annoyance to be ignored.
I would guess it's about the time that you start to interact with your users less frequently than you interact with some other category of people - investors, managers, co-workers, QA staff, subcontractors, whatever. The human brain pays vastly more attention to the people around you than the people who support you, and if the two sets are sufficiently distinct, very strange and unhelpful attitudes arise.
