for those who's fed up with the prices, with the reviewers and everything about microstock that annoys you, here's another viewpoint.

someone recommended me to a bigwig at a large company who needs some photos. right off the bat, he's trying to negotiate the price down, with loads of good reasons of course. second, he wants to see many photos before selecting one. i've never worked as hard in preparing a portfolio as i have for the micros. here's a real human being you're dealing with, not some nameless reviewer.

well, he only liked one out of the whole batch, and he's noticed it may be a little soft (it wasn't even at 100%!). you'd expect something like this from ss or is, but a non-photog in a business suit? are they in cahoots?

now i'll have to write a special rm licence just for this one photo (there're also model release problems) and i'm longing, just longing to go back and churn out my stock photos in peace.

Yup real world photography is hard work.

I recently shot for a client's website. He wanted 41 different shots of his product.
From straight on, from 10 degrees up, 5 degrees down, front view, back, side view, on black, on white etc, etc, etc.

The set up and execution took hours & hours, not to mention post processing time to clean up his crappy looking product and make it sing.

OTOH, I charged him three months worth of micro earnings 

Sounds like you just had a bad experience with one client. I find non-stock work is normally more fun and extremely more rewarding financial. Maybe you were not firm enough or maybe your wording lacked confidence and that's why he tried to get more out of you for less.
There really shouldn't be any back n forth negotiations on price. "What do you need done and what's your photography budget?" Then you let them know what it will cost ... not "how about I do it for this .. or .. would you accept this?" Base your price on their budget .. they got a lot of money in the budget = I'm going to charge them more. Think about it they are telling you how much they are authorized to spend .. if the company authorized too much who cares. Take it from them. They tell you that they have $3500 budgeted for photography guess what .. I'm making at least a couple grand off that days work. They tell you that they have a budget of $50 .. then you laugh and hang up. Simple stuff.