What does that matter? Was the OP an investor taking on risk?

Not quite sure how that's even an exception to what I'm talking about.

People who pay for the products of early-stage startups (or, say, back Kickstarters) have an emotional intuition that they've invested in the company, despite there being no legal truth to that fact.

As a growing company, you have to keep that in mind when modifying your business model: you can't betray the (entirely incorrect!) emotional intuitions of your customers, or they'll boycott you.

Actually you can. I've heard it called "firing your least profitable customers."

I haven't heard too many postmortems of people that've gone "we should've given in to the entitlement of a portion of our users." But I do hear the opposite.

That is true, but the price structures are different. Stock prices, and other equities, are already priced with everyone knowing that you have permanent ownership. Software isn't priced that way. If it were then I would expect prices to be much higher.