I was a lowly engineer at a huge company with a huge product. It had one product manager whose job was to come up with product features, about a dozen engineers and a tech lead. The product manager was a nice guy, but we (the engineers) consistently used to come up with better, simpler and useful ideas/UI for the product all the time - this was without any of us talking to any of our customers while the PM constantly used to ask/receive feedback from customers (sometimes our ideas would be shot down, only to be accepted in the next release).

My boss (tech lead) was making a pittance compared to the PM - without my boss the product would literally come to a standstill. The inequality/unfairness of it all was just sad.

I don't see this changing anytime in the near future.