Toxic? Really? So then most MMOs with vet rewards programs must be rife with truly awful people. How devious of them for selfishly supporting a game for a length of time found rewardable by the development teams. Truly terrible human beings, the lot of them!
This is a textbook case of ad hominem, attacking the arguer instead of the argument, which is then followed by a rather obvious false equivalence.
The development team instituted the veteran rewards, specifically calling them rewards, included them in the regular content updates - explicitly tied to subscription monies spent over time. Aside from taking suggestions for the rewards themselves, this is entirely run by the devs.
The anti-reward people try to obfuscate their real agenda (crying about not having free xfer tokens) by railing against the system they come from. The funny thing is, most vets acknowledge that shard shields weren't the best of ideas (even Mesanna said she wouldn't do them again). That being said, they aren't truly unbalancing in an actual gameplay sense, just in the sense of population and the already-terminally-ill economy. If you want something transferred to another shard, make friends with a vet who has shields.
BTW, the entitlement is coming from those who want the rewards without putting in the time they require.