First: if I am not happy with my site's placement in google (I don't care, but if I did), and I complain, nobody would even acknowledge my existence. I have no idea how I could even talk to a live human working for Google. People who get invited to "conversation" are obviously very special. In what way? What did they do to deserve that?
Second: certain people built their business on certain aspects of behavior of certain technology that does not belong to them and they have zero control over. These aspects changed, and their business is suffering. I understand their frustration. But why do they expect that the technology owner would do anything to help them? They aren't their paying clients. The technology owner's interests are in no way aligned with theirs. Why do they think anything would be done?
Oh, and also - why do they think anything can be done? I mean Google's codebase by now is decades of code stacked on top of older code. Probably nobody even knows how all of it works. I mean some people probably know how some parts work, but overall likely nobody knows why the ranking is such and not other. And each change shuffles things around and some pages go up and some go down. Why should anybody in Google prioritize the complaints of those who went down, and even if they did - it only would result in replacing one group of complainers with a similar group of complainers with identical complaints. It is obvious that there's no perfect ranking that would satisfy everyone, and likely at the complexity it is every change leads to unpredictable chain of rearrangements. Googlers can politely listen to those who got unlucky but they likely can't promise them anything more than that.