Personally, I approve of this. It is getting increasingly difficult to find a 'nice' domain name, and with this latest change I think most companies will stop trying to buy companyname.
"good" domain names are not terribly difficult to come by. Good branding, can be though. Hulu, Google, Yahoo, Comcast are all fairly meaningless words, until they were branded as such. It may be true that for someone that can't afford the buy a ~$100-$5000 domain from a broker may have to look/think harder to find a suitable domain, it is not THAT hard.
Country codes showed us that average users don't want other TLDs, unless they are domain hacks and can be spoken easily (.ly, .it, etc). They almost always prefer the .com, unless they can get a translated version using their own country code (google.tld, etc).
This is purely to raise money for ICANN. I understand they need money, and I understand they can do this, it just feels...bleh.
Wrong and a typical US-centric view... Germany's preferred TLD is .DE and has >15 mio registrations, .UK > 10 mio just to name the two largest ones. Generally speaking the easier (and cheaper) to register a ccTLD the more wide-spread it is in a country.
ccTLDs are never easier to register the gTLDs. Ever. Every single one of them require more than a .com/.net.
Also, registrations != user preference.
Also hulu.com even before meaning something would have retailed for the sum that you mentioned.
Apart from aesthetics, what's your reason for feeling 'bleh'?