> mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet
Do you have evidence to support this claim? I have heard major open access support coming from very senior and influent members of diverse research communities.
Even assuming that you are right, don't you think that age may be a confounding variable? Of course the opponents to the status quo are not often found among its the most established members. Of course researchers who have always worked with the Internet are more hostile towards editors as they have never known the times where they were providing a useful and nontrivial service.
> elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations
This is ad hominem, and a weird one at that. I don't see how the "value of interpersonal relations" has any relationship with the issue at hand.
> The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers [...] has it [...]
Sci-Hub was serving 200k download requests per day in early 2016 (source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...). so it looks like in fact many people need to access scientific articles and are not served well by the current system. (You may say that it doesn't matter as long as Sci-Hub is around, but Sci-Hub cannot get funding easily or be advertised widely, because of the legal insecurity around the precious service that it provides.)
> who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only
The issue isn't about how many papers we would read. Open access advocates usually have access to subscriptions. The problem is about people outside academia.
Yes, many papers are actually not read that much at all, and certainly are not read a lot outside of academia. But it's certainly not true that there is zero interest for academic research outside academia. The most obvious example are the numerous HN submissions and comments about stories related to open access, often coming for people who care about getting access to scientific articles but are not academics.
Further, the problem of closed-access is that it perpetuates the disconnection between academia and the rest of the world. If you have to hunt for scientific papers, it's sure that not many people outside academia will want to read them. The same for developing countries: poor universities can't get access to research, so they can't contribute to research, and are locked out of the system. Open-access is about saying that science is not a private club but is open to anyone.
> you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way
(1.) You have to know that you can do this, most people outside academia do not, and it's not obvious: usually when faced with a paywall on, e.g. an online newspaper, you don't ask the authors. (2.) This only works for authors who have contact information online, are responsive, in particular are alive. (3.) As a researcher I download around a paper a day on average, if I have to find contact info and write and send an email and wait for a reply for each of them, it adds up. (4.) If the authors send you their papers, they may be violating their editor's copyright, so this is still a broken system. You can say it doesn't matter and that I'm a dogmatic purist, but meh, to me it's not OK that a third party can tell me I don't have the right to share my work. It's not OK that distributing my work is an integral part of my job but is a legal minefield because of a problem which shouldn't exist.
> people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever
As a researcher, I have to sign away to editors the rights to the research that I produce, so that the editors can sell it to unsuspecting people in exchange for having put zero effort in doing the research. Meanwhile I have to work around legal obstacles to put my work online under an open license. I'd like to tell people to do what they want with my work (the way I do with my code with open-source licenses), but I can't, because maybe it's not true and publishers would have the right to object. As a taxpayer, I see the government wasting tens of millions in subscriptions to journals so that universities can buy access to the contents of public research, so I am an accomplice of this if I publish in closed-access journals. I have seen many good students get disgusted of academia when it turned out that they had to give away all rights to their work so that some corporation could make money out of it; many of my non-academic friends blame me and other researchers for their participation to this ridiculous system.
There are some valid points in what you write, but I don't understand the hostility. Even if open access mattered as little as what you seem to think, it's still a step in the right direction, so why so much contempt?