Summary: In spite of the lack of media coverage, EPO insiders (mostly people who have worked at the EPO for quite a while) see the downward spiral in patent quality and they do not trust the management
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it