To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.
Ordinary redditors are feeling the pain as well. (teddit.adminforge.de)
The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,...