I have watched over a period of months while the number of protected user pages has grown. Recently, I requested that a number of them be unprotected and Guanaco and several others were willing to do this.
There has been a backlash. Apparently there are a number of wikipedians who believe in the patently non-wiki notion that they "own" their user space and should be able to lock it up so that other users can't edit it.
Others have taken the step further and there is (I'm not making this up folks) a suggestion that we change the software to disallow all edits to user pages except by their "owners." Discussion, including calls for a "vote" on this change can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Protection_policy
There is also discussion there of the lesser measure of changing policy to permit any admin to protect their own user pages indefinitely for no reason other than personal whim.
UninvitedCompany