Dakota,
You're spending an awful lot of time glozing the business choices of your employer - I noticed you made the effort of registering on the nFusion board to post messages similar to the ones here, and I suppose if VE hadn't outright pulled their story on the LoS:V demo you'd be posting there too ;). Two thoughts occurred to me regarding this:
If you're so concerned about the decidedly negative response to the subscriber and ezpad restrictions, you should simply have released the demo without them. Otherwise, don't bother justifying what is clearly loathed by both the community
and the game's developers.
And if you're merely personally concerned about the community fallout, maybe you're working for the wrong company?