Unprofessional and uncool Shamus, calling people idiots for not agreeing with you is pretty much what your accusing them of. I like your column, but I think you went overboard here.
I'll also be honest in saying that I disagree with you about how big a deal the DLC for "Portal 2" is. There is a reason for that, and one you didn't seem to consider. The problem is that nowadays the game industry is trying to charge extra money for the kinds of things that have traditionally been included in games as part of the overall product. Alternate costumes have been a standby for games for a very long time, one of the incentives to replay games a second time with the new look, or something part of the experience revolved around as you tried to figure out how to unlock them. Right now the gaming industry has gotten to a point where they will strip everything they can out of a game to sell seperatly. Fighting games want you to pay extra money for differant color palettes or costumes for example as opposed to putting them in the game like they would have been before the current era of DLC. Had DLC not been an option, I think Valve would still have had the alternate costumes, it's just that they would have been a reward for beating the game, or reaching a certain milestone.
A lot of people talk about an attitude of entitlement among gamers when it comes to these kidns of things, but I don't think that's really the case. I think it's more a matter of people not liking to be gouged. Nobody is really innovating anything to add to games for DLC that would be worth buying, rather they are taking features that have been traditionally there to begin with, removing them from the game, and then charging extra for them. Nobody begrudges the games industry trying to make money, but people don't like to be chased around by penny pinchers, and seeing the game industry get into a mould where they increasingly want you to pay for everything.
To be honest it's the trivial DLC that bugs people the most, the costumes for Chell, the Horse Armor, and things like that. Few people complain about actual additions to a game that add a fair amount of content for the price, unless of course those additions are things that clearly should have been a part of the game to begin with. If you say create a set of DLC that adds a new Island with quests to a game world (like say what "Forge Of Virtue" did for Ultima 7) nobody really cares. However trying to charge someone for a new character skin or outfit? That's kind of ridiculous. The motive for doing this kind of thing is to make money without having to put in the effort or creativity to come up with something to add to a genuinely complete game that people will want to pay for.
In short, it's about the industry getting TOO greedy. With Valve I think it hit them unusually hard because Valve is viewed as "our company" by a lot of gamers. To see them involved in the kind of DLC garbage that you'd expect from say Capcom, doubtlessly upset a lot of people a lot more than you'd expect. NOT being involved in this kind of thing is why a lot of people loved Valve... it was the company people would point to when griping about the gimmicks other companies were running.
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I'll also say that I think you yourself are being a bit of a fanboy, as much as I hate to. To be honest I don't think Valve got "metabombed" over this. To be honest the idea of metabombing has been around for a while, as have groups like 4chan and their /V/ board and so on. People expect them, and simply put their presence has not had the affect that you are seeing recently with cases like this and "Dragon Age Rage". I have no doubt that there are people like you describe who rated the game '0' over the DLC, but there aren't enough of them to do this kind of damage all on their own. These kinds of vents are noteworthy, because it doesn't generally happen.
While there are tons of Portal "OMG, Portal is the best thing ever" fans out there, who were going to support this game no matter what, I think there are actually more people who just wanted a good game and weren't involved in any kind of fan-cult even if they liked the first one. By many accounts, "Portal 2" is really a pretty poor game, that has been seriously overhyped due to the first one. One analogy I've heard is that Portal was an "indie" darling that took the world by surprise storm by being unique and differant. It's sort of like what " The Blair Witch Project" was years ago. "Portal 2" is the big budget sell out of the original, that was going down a checklist of cliques fans wanted to see, polished up, and made to be hip as opposed to being a "true to itself" product. Basically it's "Blair Witch 2", complete with it's goth girls, and "relevent" soundtrack. Unlike the movie industry though, an anticipated video game is going to sell like hotcakes due to early, unretunrable sales. You don't see word of mouth having quite the same effect on the game industry that it does with movies, especially given the way the industry can control information and surpress reviews until after the initial sales period when it first launches. I also think that since people are pretty much stuck with the games they buy, there is also a tendency for people to lionize even turds because they are dealing with turds they own.... or to defend franchises when an installment blows chips, in hopes that the next one will be better.
Now to be fair, I have not played "Portal 2". I am not a huge fan of the series. When it goes down in price, I'll probably give it a shot though, because the idea is interesting, but I'm neither a big FPS or Puzzle game player. I'm just going by some of the feedback I've heard bebopping around the internet (the "Blair Witch" analogy wasn't mine to be fair, I got that from a random post, but it seemed to be a good one for how some people were feeling about this). There is no need to shoot the messenger (so to speak).
Generally speaking I think "Portal 2" and "Dragon Age 2" are noteworthy because they are sequels right on the tip of a trend where the user meta-ratings are not matching the professional ratings, which were apparently paid for. What's more the response obviously involves enough people (as opposed to just troll groups) where traditional ways of "fixing" the problem, like having company employees shill for you, just aren't working.
Beyond a doubt, Valve was kind of asking for it with the day 1 DLC, however that all on it's own wouldn't have caused this. Nor would a bunch of the "usual suspects" in the troll community going out to try and bomb a game just because it's a big, popular, release.
I think the industry, and those who watch, and comment on it, are simply in denial that there are cracks appearing in the walls they have built around themselves.
Portal 2 might be a great game objectively, heck maybe I'll love it when I eventually play it down the road, and be there two years later scraming it's praises belatedly (since I imagine it will be that long before the price goes down far enough for me to buy it). However, that doesn't change that what we're seeing here is a the result of actual reception from a good portion of the audience.
