Be human, chill on the assumptions. Startups are hard and you don't have all the data so Danielle deserves the benefit of the doubt, not some vaguely related ranting about responses to failure.
But please enlighten me. What kind of conversations could have possibly happened before this letter that could justify saying something like "You invested money (or time) and we've just lost all of it. You will be getting $0. But I need you to sign this so that other people CAN get some money. Oh by the way, it's a great news!"
Most common stock holders are probably former employees (whereas preferred stock holders are VCs). At this point I'm sure they didn't expect much out of this anyway, but they were once people who truly believed in the vision. If I were one of those people I wouldn't be happy to hear this fake facade about how this is a "great news". Phrases like this you should only use it for PR you send to Techcrunch, saying you had an incredible journey. But not to former employees who made a lot of sacrifices. To those people you be honest.
This reminds me of when my father's employer went out in the wake of the 1999 bubble popping. A couple of years later, the CEO sent him a very nice email saying "hey, mind signing over your stock please" and he was about to do it. I thought it was fishy that the ex-CEO want something worthless back, so I called my uncle who invests in SMEs on the side of his job and he agreed that we should ask for something back in return.
So we asked, and got, a few thousand for his stock, without a whisper of complaint from the ex-CEO (guess we asked for too little).
No what they can leverage from doing that is a different story--blood from a turnip and all that. But, there's nothing that says they must take the deal as offered.
Also, the claim that the amount paid would go towards company wind-down makes you think that plan would be negated through a drag-along, as some of the cash would "leak" to common holders.
In fact, it's actually curious that they are the acquiring the company in earnest vs. just acquiring its assets. Not sure why they would acquire the liabilities to the tune of $500K just to shut-down. Just pay for the assets and let the company use the funds to shut itself down. But, who knows? Maybe there's something (like paying customers) that they are finding difficult to transfer as an asset for some reason.
Remember -- common earned a salary, and judging from the burn, a good one, so it's eyes-wide-open in these things. Why hold a grudge and make it difficult for the company to move on?