The other thread's enlightening, and it highlights one constant in the industry: People get emotional when there's any perception that a software company or an operator is being sketchy. All it takes are a few chickens squawking and suddenly everyone's ruffling their feathers. Once the public perception is negative, it's hard to pacify people without substantial gestures (read: Money). And there's no reason it should ever get to that point. I realize I kinda jumped on the blame bandwagon here, so I shouldn't have done that. I agree with rainmaker that this is an industry-wide issue and that each company has an effect on the industry; I might disagree in principle about where a company's main obligation lies, but the central point is that this boils down to each company's obligation to provide more transparency and better public relations.
I think there's a case to be made that the model under which MG isn't itself a master IoM license-holder, and therefore is legally barred from dealing with player issues, is basically flawed. MG profits when its licensees profit; they may not own or run the RNG or the servers, but they can pull their software license anytime, and then the servers are useless. Having the power to physically shut down a casino, or the power to merge its database with another, is tantamount in some ways to running it.
To put it another way, if you want to open a casino in Vegas, you have to go through all kinds of background checks, audits and licensing hoops with the Gaming Control Board. And yes, it would be ridiculous to hold Bally responsible if, for the sake of argument, the Imperial Palace's database "lost" 90% of an account you asked them to hold. But part of the reason it would be ridiculous to blame Bally is that Bally is also licensed by the State of Nevada. You know for a fact that they aren't, and cannot, be in cahoots with the casino. They can't bring in any new game, or back of house system, or anything, without every inch of it being pored over by the (smart) tech analysts at the NGCB. The licensing process for any new machine or system that's going to tie into the revenue network is arduous, expensive and slow. Every piece of equipment is held to the same standards, there are random audits; the law states that no one who writes code for a system is allowed to actually install the system on the final hardware, and every code change has to go through the NGCB before it's installed by someone else. If you have a problem as a player with a machine or a system, Ballytech has a phone number and so does the NGCB -- and they'll be more than happy to investigate it.
Now compare that with the IoM setup and MG's role as the sole, major or even partial software provider for a given operator. Firstly, they're providing both a back-of-house system and the games themselves. Secondly, they have unknown levels of access to the code on production servers. If they themselves were their own operator or the holder of the master gaming license for all their licensees, this wouldn't be a problem, and there'd be a lot less restless natives, because everyone would know where the buck stopped. If PokerStars the software blows up someone's account, PokerStars the card room has to take the heat for it. That's a different level of responsibility. I think the perception that the buck doesn't stop anywhere in the MG universe is the main reason there's a bigger pool of people waiting to gripe about them than about publicly held companies or private provider/operators who actually run their own software. That's a PR problem rooted in a particular corporate culture and a particular structure, and I think to Rainmaker's point it does in a sense damage the industry's image to have that model be so prevalent.