The problem I think most of us have with the Académie Française is the disconnect between their decisions and the reality of the french language. Not that they are completely against change, but that they are regularly missing the point when they actually make changes.
An example is about CD-ROM. They proposed to rewrite it "cédérom". Basically turning an acronym into a completely made up word. It is ridiculous in many ways. CD-ROM is already a stupid word: both audio CDs and CD-ROMs are read only memory, so why keep that? We already had a word for audio CDs that was in common use: "disque compact", which is perfectly acceptable french, why not build on that? We translated many computer-related words in the past with great success: disquette (floppy disk), mémoire vive (RAM), logiciel (software), etc...
Sometimes, a new french translation appears that really sound good. Courriel is one of them: it sounds good and it is definitely french (from courrier (mail) and éléctronique (electronic)). And guess what... it comes from Quebec, like many other good proposals.