The games are designed to both get people addicted, and to get your friends involved by manipulating social gift reciprocity obligations. I think we'd have settled for "awful" up until the clawbacks, now we know the leadership at Zynga is sociopathic at best. Maybe not evil, but totally unscrupulous, totally unsympathetic.
But I'm not Zynga's target audience, and that's okay. And there's a lot of sympathy for your point about the "spaminess."
However, going from spammy/over-monetizing to evil has always seemed a tad dramatic to me.