What's the shitstorm? People that haven't paid for a service that didn't exist, now have to pay for a service now it exists?
I'm saying this as a person that has a couple of years of PS+ and PS Now stacked. I'm not sure what the contraversy is?
If I understood things correctly, if you already got Plus subscriptions at a discounted price they're only honoring the conversion to the equivalent basic tier without incurring in extra fees.
If you want to upgrade to a higher tier, the system is somehow able to recognize if your code belongs to a discounted offer and in that case you have to pay the extra money required to reach the full price of the tier you want to subscribe to.
So you're basically losing the discount you got on the old Plus service. If people stacked for many years this can be a boomerang in their face.
It's obviously legit but it's a move totally focused on profits so it's not meant to generate goodwill (which doesn't surprise me given that part of the business plan is probably based not so much on growth but on converting a good chunk of the current 50m users to more profitable tiers).
If you have active both Plus and Now subs once the service releases in your region you'll be migrated to Premium using as the expiration date the longer of the two you had. So this 'controversy' doesn't affects you.
If you only have Plus sub active when released in your region, you'll get PS Plus Essential with the same expiration date you had.
If you want to move to a higher tier you'll have two options: to pay the full higher tier or to use an upgrade offer that Sony has: instead of paying the full fee of the new tier, you'll pay the difference betwen you paid for plus and the price of the other tier. Example where you want to migrate from Essential to Premium exactly 1 year:
-A year of Premium costs 120$ and let's say you bought that year at $60, its normal price. You'll have to pay the remaining $60 to reach to this $120.
-Same case but you bought the year of Plus with -20% off discount at a cdkeys store: you paid $48, so to reach $120 you'll have to pay $72.
After the release, the price of Premium is $120/year. If you are upgrading from Plus/Essential, remove what you paid for a year of Plus/Essential from these $120/year.
You can think: ok it's fine, I get a year of Premium for $72 instead of $60, but it's still way less than $120.
But apparently there are people who only had PS Plus and stacked until 2043. If that people would have got a month of Now last week, now would have Premium until 2043 for only $10 or so. But now wants to upgrade these 21 years and complains that to pay (assuming a 20% discount) 72*21=$1575 is too expensive, when without the upgrade plan the price would be $2520. And wants Sony to have a cheaper upgrade deal pricing: they want Sony to apply the same pricing as if wouldn't have bought the Plus discounted, or what is the same, to apply them in the upgrade deal the same discount they had when bought plus. They are asking to be charged 60x21=$1260.