That and these gatekeepers are just bridge trolls that add zero value. It made sense back when journals were physically printed but today the distribution cost is zero.
Beyond that, people criticized other disrupted industries for continuing to provide poor customer service -- seemingly unable to fight back after decades of treating customers as captive audiences, and taking them for granted. Well if you think the music industry was bad at that, the academic publishing industry is way worse. These guys typically provide no significant value add, yet they want large economic rewards. Meanwhile, journal after journal has been shown incompetent to keep garbage papers -- even papers generated by Markov chains -- out.
My impression is that they also discriminate heavily against individual researchers, many of whom cannot afford exorbitant per-per paper fees, while large (typically subsidized) institutions get much better deals when they are able to afford bulk access.
Whilst the publishers are certainly not pulling their weight, I don't think the biggest offenders have per-paper fees. The biggest offender is probably Elsevier, and as far as I know they make their money from selling subscriptions to research institutions and universities.
As someone who reads a fair number of papers, I definitely feel like the publishers' days are numbered, and not just because of Sci-Hub and LibGen. More and more often now, I can find papers that I want, legally, on the first try. Even more encouraging, I find that when I can't find a paper I often just have to wait a few months and try again to find an open Internet source.
Case in point: a few months ago I wanted this paper -- http://bit.ly/2tE4O4K -- but all the CiteSeerX links were broken and apparently had been for a long while. About two months later it's back. This is just one example, but I find this increasingly works with many papers.
There is also ResearchGate, which is a social network to get papers from an authors, which is legal if they are alive. But their sign-up process is also much harder for independent researchers. You have to "prove you are a researcher," as though attempting to get access to research papers weren't prima facie evidence of that.
In CS the worst paywaller is consistently the ACM.
I typically say I'm a "hobbyist researcher" or something of that nature, and will generally have a response in a week, if not quicker. This even sometimes works for papers just published. I always assure the researcher that it's for my personal use only, and won't be uploaded/republished (and I uphold that part rigorously). Sometimes I've been given extra stuff (source code, other data, etc), without asking for it.
So sometimes, you can just ask - and get a copy. It doesn't always work; sometimes you get ignored, or a polite refusal. But sometimes, you get a good response. And I really appreciate that as a hobbyist.
That said, most papers I like to find or obtain are older stuff (the older the better), which in many cases is difficult to impossible to find (I suppose with some travel and physical research I could get them, but that's outside my means and time). But sometimes, a scanned copy can be found, and in those rare cases where the researcher is still alive, I can sometimes get a copy by asking in that manner as well. Sometimes I have contact the last posted research organization (in those cases, I have been informed on occasion of their passing; but I'll usually get a link or something in return for the document).
In a way, it's a "squeaky wheel getting the grease" kind of move; I'm not obnoxious about it - if I don't get a response, I leave it at that. If I get a declined response, I reply with a thank you. Better not to burn any bridges, maybe later I can get a copy.
You can't read what you need but what the publishers think you should subscribe which is worse than proprietary software because this is Science - This has become the industry standard for journal publishers.