Rather than provide feedback to B&N about the pricing so that they could understand that they'd failed to hit the market you came on to a forum with a bunch of indies on it and called it a rip off and told everyone not to use it even though you hadn't tested it yourself. I understand that early users are not seeing good results and that's valid, too. But I would like to see more of "Hey, this doesn't work right now as it is, but if you were to do X or Y, I would try it" than "To hell with those exploitative *^&#!" which seems to be the far more common reaction these days. My comment was not specific to you, by the way. It's a general trend I'm seeing across forums, tweets, and private user groups. I saw the same sort of negative comments and reactions to the new KDP Reports Beta and the recent Google survey as well.
IMO, a company is far less likely to innovate and try to give us services we could use when the community's reaction is so immediately negative and dismissive. But to each their own. YMMV. Etc.
In general, I agree that positivity is better. My problem is that none of these large companies really seem to be looking for indie-author feedback. KDP Reports Beta? We've been telling Amazon for years what we'd like to see in KDP Reports, and Amazon managed to implement exactly zero of our recommendations. It's all about color and flash, not about giving us what we've been asking for all along. A number of us have tried to give Amazon feedback in other areas as well, and occasionally, we're actually told our suggestion is good. And then...nothing. Since 2012, I can think of only a couple of exceptions to this.
Google Play Survey? Well, I can't fault them for surveying their users, but again, some of the problems, such as their arbitrary discounting, have existed for years. I'm sure Google will hear a lot about that and similar issues. Will it solve the problems? Maybe, but it's hard for me to believe they haven't received plenty of feedback on the most obvious issues already.
As for the BN ads, we'd all like to see a self-serve ad vehicle on BN, but at those prices? That's kind of a what-were-they-thinking kind of situation. The pricing suggests a complete lack of knowledge about indie publishing. Perhaps if BN had surveyed authors first about what they wanted, the system would look more attractive.
When companies really care about something, it seems to me they make more of an effort to get it right.