Yes its quite depressing, I'm new to MS and the more I learn about it the more I'm disliking it. My interpretation is that the clients, marketing departments and the stock companies are all getting rich from exploiting photographers.

For example, a client buys a 'subscription' with iStock, gets a high IQ image. 0.30c goes towards to the photographer, iStock no doubt gets a lot more through its subscription. The client then either sells the image as part of an advertising or somewhere the image ends up on pages which cost thousands of dollars to advertise in?

I was reading about TIME magazine. Apparently they used a microstock image which was bought for 15 dollars. This is for a front page for one of the most well known magazines out there making huge amounts of money from advertisements. Apart from the MS pin up boys, seems like the photographer is the loser here?

Why should SS care? Just more images to make sales with. 

Unfortunately it probably just going to get worse for most stock photographers. As more images are uploaded and more companies add to the competition, the market will saturate even for the big four. This just means lower acceptance rates, lower prices, and more 'subscription' deals since the board for each company have to come up with novel ways to attract customers. Not too mention, the 'free' image section. Why on earth would anyone give away my work for free? Especially when the people using the imagery are probably charing their clients thousands of dollars or earning thousands of dollars from advertising revenue.