If people wouldn't make such ludicrous statements as "it's down half the time" you wouldn't get people defending it.
Stop at "Downtime sucks", and I'm wholly on board with the statement. But people never stop there.
Maybe PSN's service shouldn't be as down as often as it is. How often is Steam down? How often is Xbox Live down? Compare PSN to any large service, and it's down much more often. On top of that, they have a page dedicated to telling people when the service is down...which is never updated, leaving people not knowing genuinely if there's a problem with the servers or something on your end. I mean, a lot of us came from Xbox 360 where Live was down, at most, once every 6 months.
Being upset with how often PSN is down is not ludicrous.