I think you may be taking this a little too personally - or rather, I think you may be assuming that people invoking the name of NGE are taking it personally. The reason the NGE is valid is not because it is of personal importance to players who experienced it (of which I do not number, I'm afraid, so I have no first-hand experience) but because it is of historic importance to the study of the MMO genre. I'm not aware of any other high-profile cases where a company made such sweeping changes with absolutely no warning to their players and timed so carefully as to ensure that they had bilked players that would leave due to the changes out of further money. The public outcry may be stale by now, but the fact that it existed then is of historic interest.

The parallels are absolutely valid, especially since we are dealing with the exact same company. (Though I would venture to say they would be valid even if it were two different companies.) Sony has, for the second time, added a feature they knew would be controversial with absolutely no warning and immediately after getting more money out of their players via an expansion pack. The only place the comparison breaks down is that in SWG, the game that people loved and played was totally gone. You couldn't ignore the new features because they had replaced the old ones. Here, you can just ignore the RMT vendors and keep playing EQ and EQ2. But parallels can still be drawn, I think, in regards to how one can expect Sony to behave in these kinds of situations.