There were users who were earning huge swatches of rep by asking hundreds of questions and giving little back in return.
I lost ~1k in rep back when I was >20k, and 1k back then (relatively speaking) was a fair old chunk. It was disappointing at the time but it was the right thing to do.
Asking valid and relivant questions is important, it contributes to the community. However, it is acceptible to reward answers more. [Since they do take more work]. Its their site (despite most of the site's value is derived from the work of the users), so their determination on whats important is up to them. However, they applied this retroactively. That irked me, if they had a system where they applied it after x date, that would be fine.
That decision told me... hey tomorrow they can just decide that all users with name x, y, or has numbers in the name can go bankrupt on reputation.
That was the only truly contentious user impacting change they've made over the four years the site has been around. I think your last sentence is a nonsensical justification to complain.
If anything many of the recent changes have been to make the site more inclusive such as suggested edits, better review processes and so on, so that users who are still on their training wheels on the way to the the 10k and 20k tools can practice "community moderation" under the guidance of more experienced users.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/important-reputation-r...
There were users who were earning huge swatches of rep by asking hundreds of questions and giving little back in return.
I lost ~1k in rep back when I was >20k, and 1k back then (relatively speaking) was a fair old chunk. It was disappointing at the time but it was the right thing to do.