Yeah, the amount of retard regarding early access (please don't shorten it to EA, the letters alone make me want to punch something) on Steam is pretty impressive. Most people don't seem to be capable of grasping what they're buying (not really surprising as "alpha" or "beta" probably mean zilch to the layman). There's a big fat sticky post explaining *why* Wasteland 2's early access is priced as it is, but reading is hard I guess (then again, people that are unable or unwilling to read even the big fat sticky with 4 lines of text or so are probably not exactly lost sales for a RPG)
Of course people that are interested in the game will already have bought beta access and if they really want to provide access to people that missed the beta making keys available for sale on their website seems like a much better approach and less likely to attract the typical entitled Steam-drone one finds in the kind of threads you linked above.
On another subject, I'm with the ones thinking Larian won't make the release date, there's still too much work to be done judging by the current beta (for one, the UI needs a lot of work to not be a hindrance). I just don't realistically see it happening, certainly not if it has to be somewhat stable.
Feature creep is Larian's biggest nemesis and it doesn't seem they've beaten him/her/it yet (not that I don't want all the extra goodies, of course, I want it all, and I want it on time! j/k ;)).
