I'm not upset with the stated changes; mostly because as a small business owner I get the pressure to make money to stay in business.
When you're living off of VC dollars you can defer that conversation for a while but not forever. We've reached the end of 'a while'.
Presumably (and I won't look at SO's site stats so as not to cloud my answer with inside information), there is a slowdown in growth, and the company has received a bit of bad press about how it's fitting into a world where programming is evolving to the "diverse teams build better software" mantra (we will all benefit from this for decades to come).
The community had long shared the company's goal of an 'encyclopedia of knowledge'; unfortunately, that goal also represents an understanding that not every problem a programmer has should be in that encyclopedia.
When it was Jeff and Joel directly driving the vision, the features oscillated between the two camps (Open to new users vs. Only good question that add to that encyclopedia stick around). Now that there's an entire product team devoted to Q&A and they see the downsides of the "only new good questions stick around" as gatekeeping, and the disadvantages to the life of the product that gatekeeping has, they're making changes to ensure that Stack Overflow will continue to be relevant to this and the next generation of programmers.
Those people who started out with Jeff and Joel are still here (I'm one of them), and now some are upset because they don't feel like the original goal is important to the company, and part and parcel to that is that they don't feel listened to or cared about since their critical features as power-users is not the features that will allow the company to grow. There's a natural (or unnatural) attrition rate for users on this site; the power-users make up a tiny fraction of the site's total population, and in a time of limited resources, the company has to prioritize either keeping the tiny-fraction of power-users happy or continue to ensure the site is relevant to the larger programming community.
For the record: I believe that we have to change in order to continue to be successful. I have come to realize that keeping people out because their question is "too simple" or "they could have googled it" is not how you would mentor a junior programmer, and we should model the behavior we want to see out of programers. We want junior programmers to reach out for help instead of keeping it in.
I believe that it is normal to be upset when the goals change; but I also believe that you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The people who own this platform are deciding what the vision of this platform is. We can either agree with that vision and work towards it, or disagree and stop participating.