The public isn't as powerless to enact change as you make them out to be.
People here, if organized, could absolutely change things especially considering the resources at the financial disposal of those here.
No, I don't mean issues like what you see endlessly litigated on the news. There's countless other issues that barely get any attention in the news such as - Copyright! Not to abolish it - that will never happen, but changes are absolutely possible.
In other words, it ends up making it easy for issuers to selectively bully small weak targets while carefully avoiding anyone who could fight back legally. The fact that one thing was removed/kept doesn't create precedent for another fundamentally identical thing posted by someone else.
I think the main issue here is, if you're a victim of DMCA fraud it's hard to get a case in front of a judge because of the way the law is written. But that doesn't mean it will never happen, and if it does I absolutely feel like a judge might set a precedent which curtails the practice, because judges by nature tend to take a dim view of abuse of process.