The thing is: we honestly don't want to piss people off. The whole LJ staff are also LJ users, and we're in a constant, chronic state of juggling fifteen different balls; seriously, you should hear our project/product planning meetings, because they're hours of "well, okay, we could try THIS..." "Nope, that'd cause World War III." But we have the same problem that the Vocal Outcriers have; we see our own particular 'sector' of LJ, and no matter how much we try to expand past that, we all bring our own particular tailored usage to the table.
Now, I think we've got an advantage in that the mixture of decision-makers on LJ comes from a very diverse cross-section of LJ users; we have the Geek Subset and the Fandom Subset and the Here For The Cool Communities subset and the I Want a Private Journal subset and the Web 2.0 Blogging Crowd subset all represented in just the core LJ-managers team, for instance. So, say, our Geek will see Trend X and propose Solution Y that won't piss off his fellow Geeks, and our Fan will say "well, no, that'll break this" for her fellow Fans, and our Community-user will say "yeah, but we could do this instead", and the Journaler will say "that would make it more difficult for people to do this," and etc etc ad nauseam. Ultimately, though, it falls down to our product manager and our general manager to say, okay, we need to do something, and it's going to piss people off -- because there are, literally, thousands of different subsets of LJ, and they're all using LJ in drastically different ways.
We think we have a responsibility to all the users, though, to make sure that LJ's still around in {one, two, ten} years for them to still have that platform, however they use it. And there are a shitload of things we have to balance and juggle and tweak, and sure, we get them wrong sometimes, or it turns out that something we thought would only piss off Subset A and make things better for Subset B-G actually pisses off Subsets A-F and only makes things better for Subset G. (This is when we send the crystal ball back to the shop and go back to, well, drinking heavily.) But we really do have an eye on the long-term health and viablity of LJ as a whole, and it sucks that we can't release our statistics and show people exactly what we're trying to fix, but we can't.
To address your specific point -- yeah, in an ideal world, people would pay attention to the news channels, but in practice, they don't. There are several million active or semi-active accounts on LJ, held by someone without any other journals, that don't read news. Depending on word-of-mouth to reach them just flat-out doesn't work. However, when we make a change and offer an opt-out, they generally accept the change and integrate it into their LJ use; the percentage of people who actually use the opt-out is very small. Fractional, even. (For me to prove this to you would require another small novel of a comment, but I've got multiple examples.)
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Now, I think we've got an advantage in that the mixture of decision-makers on LJ comes from a very diverse cross-section of LJ users; we have the Geek Subset and the Fandom Subset and the Here For The Cool Communities subset and the I Want a Private Journal subset and the Web 2.0 Blogging Crowd subset all represented in just the core LJ-managers team, for instance. So, say, our Geek will see Trend X and propose Solution Y that won't piss off his fellow Geeks, and our Fan will say "well, no, that'll break this" for her fellow Fans, and our Community-user will say "yeah, but we could do this instead", and the Journaler will say "that would make it more difficult for people to do this," and etc etc ad nauseam. Ultimately, though, it falls down to our product manager and our general manager to say, okay, we need to do something, and it's going to piss people off -- because there are, literally, thousands of different subsets of LJ, and they're all using LJ in drastically different ways.
We think we have a responsibility to all the users, though, to make sure that LJ's still around in {one, two, ten} years for them to still have that platform, however they use it. And there are a shitload of things we have to balance and juggle and tweak, and sure, we get them wrong sometimes, or it turns out that something we thought would only piss off Subset A and make things better for Subset B-G actually pisses off Subsets A-F and only makes things better for Subset G. (This is when we send the crystal ball back to the shop and go back to, well, drinking heavily.) But we really do have an eye on the long-term health and viablity of LJ as a whole, and it sucks that we can't release our statistics and show people exactly what we're trying to fix, but we can't.
To address your specific point -- yeah, in an ideal world, people would pay attention to the news channels, but in practice, they don't. There are several million active or semi-active accounts on LJ, held by someone without any other journals, that don't read