Creating and maintaining any commons requires rules and work. CC evangelists do want people to use their work, but they also want to create a situation where lots of people use lots of other people's work, which means getting creators to be comfortable offering their creations. CC does a great job of capturing and expressing the common concerns of creators, which makes more work available. But that only works in the long run if those concerns are truly honored.
So I don't think they're being hypocrites at all. You may prefer to release your stuff into the public domain. (Funnily, you don't link your PD-shared works in your profile, so you must not want people to use your work freely either.) But others prefer differently. Looking at Flickr, it looks like the CC-licensed collection is about 100x larger than the PD-licensed collection: