None of the haters were advocating f2p model as well. All they wanted was that their 15$ a month be better worth it-- which wasnt for most of them. E.g. repeated bugs which never gets resolved, multiple maintenance downtimes every week, poor customer support, lack of end game -- just to list a few grievances. They just wanted EA to fix those issues so that it's till worth paying $15 a month for it.
Instead, EA compromised. ""SWTOR is a miss". We can't invest further into improving all those things that makes it a miss. So, we will make it F2P so that people don't have to deal with getting $15 worth of buggy stuff.