I think it is coming from people who go from a dumb/feature phone to a smartphone and don't realize the difference. Yeah your old moto razr may have been able to run off one charge for 4 days while you talked and texted 16 hours a day but that phone doesn't do the same things that any android phone does. This phone is made to call people, send text, surf the web, listen to music, stream/download whatever you wish, play games, run apps, check email, pay bills... Now what was that razr used for? Calls, texts, play some crappy VZW version of a game that would have been cutting edge in 1995, and that is about it.
People want a phone that is sturdy and not cheap feeling like the droid charge, not heavy like the thunderbolt, does everything out of the box that they want a phone to do like uh...no phone, requires not work on the end user to make the phone work just like they like, and has a battery that lasts all day out of the box with no requirement for them to pay attention to what the phone is doing. If you can't make the commitment to having a smartphone, which requires you to learn the phone and work to get it set up to your liking, then perhaps you should save yourself money, time, and trouble and get a feature/dumb phone.