Many of us mining here at Anandtech forums are small fish. Yes we have a nice handful of cards that were bought from places like NewEgg or Amazon, but really, anyone with less than 100 cards is essentially a small time miner.
The problem is Big Money got in the GPU market around 3 - 4 months ago. When the price of Ether shot up the whales started buying direct from places like Zotac bypassing the remaining channels. A minimum order of $500,000K is required or they don't bother with you.
I have a business friend who just this weekend asked me if I wanted in on a group buy from Zotac for 1070's (split order between 3 to 5 people) and I just kinda laughed at him trying to explain how risky this all is now (not to mention he knows nothing about mining itself).
I tried explaining the amount of work involved to keep that many cards mining is almost a full time job (Hydro, climate control, floor space, power conditioners, specialized racks, etc and not to mention the complexity of trying to automate it all).
Unfortunately this is typical with some people that have money. They spot a trend, usually after the profitability period and then the FOMO/greed kicks in where in this case they're buying up all the cards directly from manufacturers.
These people have connections and are easily bypassing the retailers. Some of the larger orders are straight out of Foxconn bypassing the major brands themselves!
So who do you blame here?
The gamer/miner who's hobby allowed them to pay off the expensive videocard? The small time miner trying to keep ~+-10 rigs in a normal sized house up and running? The medium sized miner who's taken their hobby and turned it into a full time job? The whale/investor buying thousands of cards and hiring out all the legwork? Do we blame the manufacturer for selling direct to whale/investor (at still over MSRP prices)? How about blaming AMD/Nvidia for ignoring the obvious demand and had ample time to ramp up production?
It's a complex problem that can't really be solved easily but one thing that's clear to me is that everyone selling the hardware (including AMD and Nvidia) is making a shed load of money. It's hard (in fact, irresponsible) for large corporations to ignore making money for their shareholders. This is a systemic problem that cuts much deeper than Johnny gamer getting gouged on a video card.
The good news is Proof of Stake is on the way for the most popular GPU Blockchain (Ethereum). Also, specialized ASICs have been designed for mining Ether which will be released soon, and that should eventually render GPU's unprofitable once a number of large farms are setup even if Ether doubles in price or Proof of Stake is delayed.
The argument of "I'll just shift mining to X coin" is a bit of a silly one. Everyone with GPU rigs will do the same thing driving the difficulty rates up until it becomes either unprofitable, or ASICs get released. Rinse repeat for the next algorithm (there's only so many of these).
A properly engineered ASIC will always outperform general purpose processor.
Yes you can make algorithms ASIC resistant like Ether is but its nigh impossible to avoid them once your coin hits a certain value. This has happened to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Monero (FPGA's but eventually ASICs will come) and now Ether. Don't think it won't happen to ZCASH or (insert profitable coin) either.
I suspect long term we'll have a few major winners in each category of the Blockchain space like we do in the tech world but it'll likely be separated between something like Bitcoin (singular use, self described) and Ethereum (an entire platform used for multiple reasons).
I'm staying away from the environmental issues since it's subjective and probably deserves its own thread.