Much of the issue is that Google is primarily concerned about hitting large corporations and brands. Smaller brands and sites seem to be seen as some sort of collateral damage. It is easier to get hit by a "spam penalty" if you are a small fry than if you have a bigger site and brand. There almost appears to be a presumption where if your site is small or less popular then you are some sort of spammer or low quality.
If Google can't make an algorithm change without causing 10% or higher false positives then if they had any sense at all they just wouldn't do it until they could prevent this. The song and dance about only affecting 3% of queries is obviously a bunch of bullshit. Google doesn't lose a thing besides some Goodwill by screwing a big percentage of smaller webmasters. But it's their site so what can you do besides but up some links to Bing?
