Guncrasher... your wrong. More people talk with their wallet and with the "quit" key than with their keystrokes in the chat buffer. You are referring to what you hear in the one arena after prime time. The problem comes in the switch to prime time and from prime time to non.
Here we have a prime example of how the majority votes and then the minority protesters over rule the vote.
I'm very curious were you get your information from about how the majority really thinks. If they do not complain anywhere, but just quit... you must have access to some data we do not have.
Or maybe you are just stretching things a bit to support your own individual view due to lack of public support?
Fact is, yes, people DO complain publicly if they do not like something. See the outrage on the original arena split. The complains about dars. The complains about arena caps for years. In game, they do complain even more when something seems wrong to them. Only in this case everybody suddenly shuts up?

And the wallet thing... have you also taken into consideration that there may be some folks that came back, or simply didn't quit just because of the installment of the offpeak arena? Just as you will probably tell me you "know a lot that quit", I can tell you: I do know players that did not, and some that even came back, because now they do not face an empty arena any more.
And just for the record: I am going through the arena switch from offpeak every day, and from peak to offpeak 2-3 times a week. I "suffer" from the same problem as you. So I pretty much know what I'm talking about when I say: The general impact on gameplay caused by this disruption, annoying as it is, is much less severe than the old setup. In the old setup you had a large arena without the population to support it for many, many hours a day. And when the caps kicked on, you had the gameplay severely disrupted for hours, not just ~20 minutes.