I think the outcry is about the price of PLEX in general, whether it's for game time or for the monocles, but the cause for the price is the monocles and Aurum in general.

More specifically, everyone remembers when P amount of PLEX cost price X in ISK. Since nobody wants to pay $70 for monocles, and you can translate P -> A (Aurum), then in many people's crazy theory, it should cost X and nothing in real world since X -> P -> A.

However, since somebody somewhere has to buy P for it to be available, somebody somewhere is still paying $70. SInce more people want P for A, naturally the price in ISK goes up and/or supply will run out.

So the outcry then is that not only do the monocles cost $70, but it's "destabalized" the market for PLEX, so those getting PLEX via in-game methods can't do so because all the PLEX is gone or is close to gone and many times more expensive.

tl;dr - Without Aurum, PLEX market would have never skyrocketed, and the in game economy would have remained stable. Therefore, it's because of the monocles (the most popular item) that the game economy sucks.

Maybe if PLEX wasn't part of the equation, people would realize that the monocles cost somebody $70 and then wouldn't complain when you can't just go out into space and farm up more like you can minerals/herbs in WoW.