>>393359523
It's not even that. They have a problem from a business standpoint. Mods are entirely too common and too well accepted by the community. How are they going to sell features to people later if modders will just mod them in?
The great number of people who are upset about losing quality of life is exactly who they are targeting with this. Script kiddies and dedicated hackers will just bypass EAC anyway, but who really cares as far as business is concerned, they weren't going to be paying anyway.

What they are trying to accomplish is the ween the majority of the userbase off mods, the people who won't bypass EAC but are power users, so that mods are less accepted and so that they can sell quality of life to these people later. 
Which is why they're characterizing mods as evil things that hackers and avatar thieves use - they also need to get the level to which people accept modding back down to the ground level, so these people won't mod their clients and will happily buy the things that they're selling later on.
It's all about taking control of the platform back so that they can keep it locked down and sell things to people later. I imagine they're just going to weather the storm for the short term.