Everyone always whines about the F2P cash shop model, but they seem to miss one thing, you don't have to buy anything. You can go about playing a product that cost thousands of hours of work and pay absolutely nothing, and still get a decent experience. The problem arises from being human, people want to get the best possible or compete and thus feel a need to buy these pay items in order to keep up, despite there being no real necessity.
In the real world though, people expect to be paid to work, just like you do, so the company has to make money to pay employees and server fees. Spoiled little rich kids are not only paying for their game, but yours as well. Next time you see someone decked out in premium gear or a car, or even an asteroid that cost ridiculous sums of money, thank them for keeping the servers alive. Games that are truly "free to play" fail, because you can't put out a quality product for free. Someone has to pay the price, and you don't want to be the one.
Balance between premium and free content however is very important, so I'm sure EA is still screwing it up somehow.