But so very often it implies "Loudest customer" -- that is, they are the most likely to loudly and publicly complain. Games live and die on the whims of their audiences; It's generally a very bad idea to piss off the most dedicated 10% of your playerbase.

Unless that dedication is highly remunerative, pissing them off can be the smart thing to do, if that means pleasing the other 90%. The problem comes when the developers are having their egos stroked by this dedication. Imagining that those players are somehow valuable for PR is part of the rationalization for serving them, but experienced lesser players will learn that a game that caters to that elite won't be fun for them, and will treat that catering as the negative sign it is.

You're not wrong, but the other end of the spectrum is that you don't have any players because the only ones talking about it are unhappy.

I used to work on F2P games, and you have to balance things. As nice as it would be to ignore the loudmouths, unless you can guarantee that no one else is listening to them either, which you can't, you'll have to cater to them somewhat to pacify them.