It strikes me that the book world is a microcosm of the real world; its power is unequally distributed. Why else would they call sending in a manuscript submission?

To open the discussion I would invite you to look at one publisher's particularly pithy (and mildly obscene---warning) submissions page. Hopefully we can approach this with a sense of humor and perspective. http://www.thedonotpress.com/submissions.html

One thing about this subject is that if you look at it from the publisher/editor point of view, it can be compared to a lottery where the odds that the pile of manuscripts they have to go through will have anything they can use is very small.

I like to describe the editor-writer relationship in this way:

The editor is Milady's servant, sent from the castle down to the marketplace to find "just the right thing" to go with Milady's gown for the upcoming ball.

All the servant knows is what Milady's gown looks like and what Milady tastes are in general.

The servant has to go through the entire marketplace, looking at all the wares, and hope that there will be something that Milady can use to make her gown the hit of the ball.

The servant doesn't have to tell the vendors anything about what she is looking for, and in fact, the servant probably can't, because she will only know it when she sees it.

The servant doesn't have to give any one of the vendors feedback on what they are selling, nor does she have to suggest to them that they sell earrings instead of necklaces or scarves instead of reticules. That's not the servant's job.

The servant may pick up something and ask, "Do you have this in blue?" But the servant doesn't have to say anything at all.

Being a hobbyist glass bead maker, I think of editors and publishers in a more mundane manner. To me they seem like bead stringers who get shipments of glass beads of all shapes and sizes. They dig through the boxes and bins of beads, looking for ones which are enough alike to string as necklaces. Once they have enough strands of a particular kind they can sell them in neatly labeled packets, "green round beads" and "brown square beads".

(Mine isn't really a very good analogy. No matter how good my beads are, nor how efficient I am in making them they are more expensive and less perfect than the ones made by endless rows of eight year old children chained in front of their torches in China and Indonesia. Commercial bead stringers are supporting and perpetrating some really bad labor practices but the publishers are grooming a few workers whom they hope will corner the market.)