‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ — a well-known attitude of especially… single-minded adepts of whatever in particular and a black-and-white worldview in general. An implication: if you try to maintain a reasonable, balanced, middle-of-the-road attitude in any kind of ‘flame war’, both parties will consider you to be on the side of evil, nothing less. Of course, this general principle applies to a small particular matter of Mercs haters, too.
I’m really surprised you’ve still got patience to try and reason with logic repeatedly against this hopeless and inevitable perspective — unless you consider this an exercise (which I generally do when writing on a forum).
I suppose this might be the opportunity for me to say it: a certain group of Mercenaries haters on this forum reminds me of… dejected lovers: ‘I’ve been chasing this particular person for three days just to tell them how I feel totally indifferent towards them.’
For instance, there are plenty of games I don’t like or play, but you don’t see me running about on different forums, ‘yellling’ how they are ‘trash’ and going on with angry rants — again and again. If you don’t care about something, you would just go on with your business, wouldn’t you? But no, if you are one of those people, you’ve gotta drop in whenever you see a topic about Mercenaries — often a very specific one — just to inform eveyone how you don’t like it, don’t play it and don’t undertand why someone woud.
PS
There’s more than that: not only don’t people like to admit their own mistakes or even stupidity, but also there’s even a trend of actively encouraging and nurturing the infantile worldview of the whole world revolving around a single individual — the poster child of this educational approach, I guess — like the sun, and if something goes wrong — it’s definitely someone else’s fault, because what else could it be? 
For instance, you could blame
I wouldn’t be surprised in that actually counts from when the first saloon was opened in their particular… place of residence (and, apparently, the whole history is no more than hundred years), where people seriously go to court after spilling hot coffee on themselves, because no-one told them they shouldn’t do this. 
And, of course, the idea of someone doing dumb things and thus being their own worst enemy is preposterous, whatever-ist (insert a negative label of your choosing here) and so on.
Now, if something about the product marketing is misleading, important information is being withheld, bad practices are being used and so on — that’s another matter. The thing is, I’m not aware of issues like this with this game to substantially call it ‘predatory’, ‘unethical’ etc. As you’ve put it,
Some marketing tricks? Certainly, but that’s another question.