Putting (a wad of) Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?

For as long as there have been anime fans on this side of the Pacific, some of them have been importing original releases from Japan. When I was watching what my university's anime club showed, an "online magazine" had regular pieces about laserdiscs. When I was starting to buy DVDs, the main message board I was reading had people who imported "R2" DVDs for their region-free players (and complained about the picture quality of releases over here being lower). Nowadays, the same message board (in a continuity-of-community sense) has a vocal group of people who import lots of Blu-Rays and complain about releases over here having interlaced video, lossy sound, and subtitles that can't be turned off. I keep seeming to have to fight the feeling I'm being encouraged to consider myself a second-class citizen for suffering sticker shock whenever I convert the price and being convinced not all of the higher price goes into painstaking encoding, and then remembering the warnings about how animators in Japan scrape to make a living too. Maybe I'm just too eager to conclude there's an element of spite to the way a lot of importers talk and overemphasise the thought of them turning their up noses at domestic releases through conspicuous consumption.
( Not a hypothetical case any more? )