> And so here we are. On the one hand, we've got a handful of bitter, angry, beaten up and ignored core users, who do all the moderation of the site and provide a large percentage of the answers that makes Stack Exchange what it is. On the other hand, we have poor unsuspecting staff who are getting piled on by those above users simply because a.) they're bearing bad news and b.) they're staff.

This is untenable.

All that this is doing is making things even worse between staff and users. We need to resolve the problem on both sides - blaming just one side is not going to do anything, like …

If that employee is meet with people that shout "the company is evil" (because let be honest, outside of a few case even the hostile users never went out yelling "JNat/any other named employee is evil" - they focus their hate on the company not individuals) and does not ask themselves why they are mad we also have a problem. The employee may not know the history but they can look up the history...
Now, if internally they receive mails that tell them "everything is fine, we are doing great, we trust this will end soon" that is a separate problem someone mentioned on some blog./