I think some gamers are resistant to certain types of change, the most obvious examples being the move to casual gaming, gaming and nerd culture becoming "mainstream," and more women being involved in the gaming community.
But none of those have anything to do with why people dislike EA. Honestly, they know what we don't like about them, we've told them a million times over. Never in my life have I ever seen such straight-up denial from a company regarding its problems in the face of such undeniable criticism--and all over stuff that is easily fixed. Seriously, EA, if you want people to like you again, here's what you need to do:
1. Make Origin and its EULA less obnoxious and more like Steam
2. Have sales and quit publicly going on about how much you dislike them (seriously, what the fuck? do you not like money or something?)
3. If you are looking into buying up a smaller studio, either make plans on using it or leave it the fuck alone. This isn't the Industrial Revolution and you aren't J.D. Rockefeller, so stop acting like you have to crush everybody within a ten mile radius to secure your income.
4. Cut it out with the obnoxious DRM and limited downloads and installations for games. Let me tell you a little story about the current state of PC gaming for me: I have a mac, and on it I have Windows dual-booted on a part of the drive I specifically set aside for Windows. But...that side for Windows is only 100 gigs. When you're like me and enjoy games like Mass Effect, Skyrim, and Saints Row the Third that 100 gigs doesn't go very far. So in order to play these games, I have to uninstall them to play new ones, and then reinstall them when I want to play them again (and conveniently enough, the Steam Cloud also aids this process by preserving my saves as well).
And this is really true of every PC gamer, because nobody's hard-drive is infinite. Everybody is going to have to clean house at some point. So if you want any long-term customers on the PC gaming market, then you're going to have to cut out this limited installation nonsense. As I saw one person on the Ubisoft forums put it: If you're going to treat us like pirates, we might just start acting like them.
5. Take the shit out of your development process. There isn't a need for game budgets the size that you make them, and you certainly shouldn't be needing to ship 5 million units at $60 apiece in order to just get your original investment back. It's clear this isn't helping your game's quality or their marketability, so there is no point in you keeping this process around.
6. Learn these words "You are right, we are wrong." The customer is always right, even if they are wrong. Games aren't just a product anymore, they're a service. What the customer thinks of you matters in the long run, and directly affects how much business you do with them in the future. So ignoring criticisms or outright telling the customers they are wrong is certainly not going to secure you anymore sales in the near future.
7. Stop making stupid public announcements about how you want to be 90+ on Metacritic all the time or whatever. If that's what you want, great. But those words mean nothing and earn you no admiration until you actually step up and accomplish that.
Yes, it is sort of popular to rag on EA, but never think for a moment the criticism is undeserved. Further denial will only lose you more customers.