Should I go there?

I'm debating on whether or not I even want to bring up the recent development of, and the volatile response to the addition of the Gift Guide button on Etsy storefronts.

But seeing as how I just did, I guess I'll just give my opinion while I'm at it.

I agree with most of the angry people. Etsy can do what they want with their site. That's the ultimate point, I guess. But they have given us our own space to list our items. We pay them to list our items. We pay them when those items sell. Seems like a fair deal.
Up until now, that space that they gave us was nice and cozy and we were allowed to do with it what we wanted. Etsy has fun coming up with guides and articles and showcases and treasuries and labs and educational stuff. They've got links to that stuff all over the place. EXCEPT on our pages.
Sure, you could get to any of those places from our pages, but it wasn't in your face, so our pages could continue to be our cozy little storefront where we did our best to greet our customers with quality, handmade items in the hopes that they would stay and browse and buy something.
But the addition of this Gift Guide button is a little bit of an intrusion. And to make it so obvious and garish just intrudes even more. All the work we did in our store (as well as the endless work we do outside of our store to get customers IN our store) is for nothing because now those customers are lured away by this glowing beacon of a button.
A poster in the forums had a good analogy. She compared it to two vendors at a craft show. She said it wouldn't be fair for one vendor to put a neon sign that advertised her booth in the other vendors booth. It would be even more unfair if the sign-placing vendor was getting paid by the other vendor to have a booth there.
So, basically, I agree with all the angry people.
Having said that, I could present the alternative and much less popular view:
It's Etsy's site. They can do with it what they want. We only pay them for two things: 1)the ability to list an item for sale. 2) The code for the checkout process.

We don't pay them for all the nice little conveniences they create for us to make listing our item easier. We don't pay them for all the work they do behind the scenes creating things that they think will bring buyers to the site. I would go so far as to say that we don't even really pay them for the page that we call our store. We just pay them for the space it takes to show the item listing itself. Everything around that (the sections, the hearts counter, the feedback system, the conversation system, our profile, our policies, our favorites, the banners and avatars, featured items, vacation mode, batch sorting and shipping, forums and chat, etc.) is extra. Our $0.20 is for the listing only. The 3.5% of the sale price is for the checkout process.
If they really wanted us to be able to completely customize our store appearance, then they'd make it like Blogspot and make every aspect of it customizeable. But they don't. Everyone's shop looks the same. Why?

It's our ITEMS that are meant to attract the customer.
Not a customizeable layout. Not a colorful background that we made ourselves. Not embedded music or a news feed.
This is not Facebook. This is not Twitter. This is not MySpace. This is not Blogspot.
This is Etsy. It's where people come to buy our handmade items, not the "handmade" website on which they're sold.
If our items can't keep the attention of our customer and prevent them from straying off to that orange button in the upper corner, then there's something wrong with our items.

So for all those people that are boycotting Etsy, and refusing to list or relist or renew items because they don't want to give Etsy any money until they remove that Gift Guides button because they say it's ruining their sales, I have some advice.
You'd likely have a better case if you continued as you normally would. Because if that Gift Guides button truly does negatively affect your sales, you need to be able to prove it. You need to be able to say, "Look, I did what has proven to generate sales in my shop in the past, but ever since you added that button, my sales have plummetted." If you have always renewed, relisted, or listed and you suddenly stop, who's to say that THATs not the reason your sales have dropped?

So quit bitching, people. I'm guessing that if you stopped wasting time complaining in the forums and used that time to promote your store, make more items, take better pictures, and just relax, you'd keep making sales. Possibly even more than normal.