What makes you think it's the OSHW community? If TI will work with you only if you're high vol then I could see a lot of smaller businesses seeing this tactic working against them too.
They get way more ROI by heavily supporting bigCos who will give them millions of dollars of business YOY rather than helping a zillion mom and pop shops who can barely wire a resistor the right way.
Think of it as a tacit strategy of "firing your worst customers". Having worked in bigCo vs small Co, there are a lot of small Co and OSHW EEs who barely have a clue what they're doing. It's not worth TI's time or money to help these people out. Upleveling lousy engineers thru support only to net them a 10 piece part order, is a really lousy ROI. (Unless of course we're talking an ASIC or some other astronomically high ROI custom piece. But, I'm assuming that we're not, because I don't work for a military prime contractor.)