That was one of the things which "upset Sculley" -- he wasn't blind, you know. But had Jobs remained loyal to Sculley, Sculley would have looked past Jobs treatment of employees and kept Jobs on for the sake of retaining "insanely great" innovations at the company. While Jobs did evil things to "underlings" beneath him, none of those people had the power to fire him. His firing was linked to Sculley and the board of directors.
Interestingly, most all of the board members quit when Jobs came back to Apple in the late 90's. And a couple of those board members were board members at the time when Jobs was axed in the 80's.
As to the comment about 512k RAM used in Jobs demo. I must again agree with Kallikak. And I must add that comment has nothing at all to do with an OPEN or CLOSED system. It only had to do with RAM.
But going back to the exact title of this thread, I still don't get it. Sure, I hate to see Macs sold as fish tanks on EBAY -- which is the epitome of "mourning the loss" of an original Mac. But are we to police the world of used Macs? What can we do about it other than keep this site lively to show people classic Macs can be useful and fun. The fact is that upgraded and utterly mutilated Macs appear for sale on the net all the time. This is nothing new. I don't advocate fish tanks or gutting of old Macs, but I don't see any need to "mourn the loss" of such machines. It's not like this is happened "to every single classic Mac out there in the world today." It's only a few here and there. The vast bulk of machines out there are either sitting in closets of their original owners, or have been already dropped off at the city dump, or are still in use by the good people who post on 68kMLA!
So move past the "mourning" for a Mac you don't own, and get on with using (and posting about) a Mac you do own and love!