Hmmm.
After a few days listening to the loose nuts on the ground spew their mistruths, I thought I'd clarify a few things.
First of all, someone referenced Kevin's supposed behavior on the net. NANI?
He's not even HAD any sort of personal net presence for most of the last 10-12 years, after some fanatics started attacking him online over the WotC issue (see below). Instead, at various times, Maryann (his now-ex wife, and still a good friend of his), Wayne Smith, and one or two other employees handled ALL online presence for the company. In fact, only in THE LAST THREE TO SIX MONTHS has he even started posting on Palladium's forums, mostly due to the issues concerning the employee theft. In fact, he never even had an actively-used e-mail address since those early 90s events, until he HAD to have one, to sell what wasn't stolen from the company vault, of his private animation cel and toy collections (most of the really valuable stuff got stolen, prior to then). If you ran into someone online claiming to be Kevin in 1995-2005 it's 99.9% sure IT WASN'T HIM.
Most of the "Palladium Bashing" results from reports by disgruntled persons AFTER their dismissal. Having written for the company myself, I know what really happened in some of the cases. I can't be sure which line of BS you're using for your basis, so I'll detail the ones I know.
1. In the case of one of their more famous early artists, he kept missing a deadline, giving excuses that later turned out to be not true. It is also suspected (by fans and Palladium bashers alike) that he plagiarized a number of his mech designs he drew for Rifts from anime art books, though no one has said if that had any bearing in his departure from Palladium. After leaving the company, he and another person formerly associated with the company printed an RPG that used a blatant copy of Palladium's system, with the only difference being the copyrighted term names being changed - the mechanics were Palladium's "with the serial numbers filed off". It cost a company they was working with its existance. The artist, according to a Ral Partha sculptor I knew, was later fired from FASA for blatant copying of mech body parts from a Gundam art book, in a period where FASA had ordered that no anime reference books be kept in work spaces (including home offices), due to the furor over the anime-based designed they'd unwittingly bought a bogus usage contract for*.
1.a. (*a long story - up until the 3055 art book came out, everyone thought their contract was legit - it was only found out when the yearly payment for the Macross/Dougram/Crusher Joe designs came back "return to sender", and they went through HG & Palladium to try to find where to send their payments to. It was Playmates who sued FASA & vice-versa - Palladium specifically signed a waiver opting out of any part in the suits, except where they were called to testify - more bizarrely, even though both suits (one dismissed, the other settled) went in Playmates' favor (I've seen the rulings/settlement details), there are still Battletech fanatics that insist FASA won both suits and it was Palladium suing them - Jesus Christ on a crutch!)
2. The WotC/Palladium suit (pre-magic, involving a book of conversion systems for converting from one RPG to another) was more of a friendly/white knight suit than an attack. In fact, Maryann Siembieda was one of the first people to be given one of the promotional pre-Alpha Black Lotus cards - not something one would expect if they'd been really hostile. The settlement in the case removed the WotC product from the market, but little else - and it pre-empted a lawsuit from the Williams-era TSR, which was going to try to take WotC down outright (having already crippling out the original incarnation of Mayfair for daring to release the "Role-Aids" books, and about to similarly demolish GDW for Dangerous Journeys). the decision for Palladium pre-empted any more draconian measures from occuring, and saved WotC, so that they could prosper, and eventually do unto TSR what TSR wanted to do to them.
3. The conflict between GDW & Palladium was simply over letting Palladium have the chance to oversee articles that impacted their games (which would add 1-3 months additional time before the articles saw print - maybe more if licensed). Part of this dealt with licensing issues (with Harmony Gold in particular, if articles were Robotech-based - my own Robotech article got delayed a YEAR by HG, but you also had Mirage Studios and TMNT.) Some of the lesser problems GDW had in its last days were, in fact, over Star Wars and Star Trek articles from Challenge, that they published with permission of the RPG rights owners, but without oversight from Lucas or Paramount, respectively, but this aspect was overshadowed by the TSR 800-lb-gorilla lawsuit monkeys of that time period, and their attack on GDW.
4. One former Palladium writer with a fascination of munchkin tech/supernatural, exponentially escalating power creep, and (with other companies) the walking dead, repeatedly sent in a manuscript that kept getting sent back for revisions, after people complained about his previous 4 or 5 books for Rifts having too much power-creep (The CS, Triax and (later)Japan were supposed to be the highest tech, and the author had banana republics with superior technology to them). A typical exchange was a list of items that were too munchkin for the Rifts setting, that needed tweaking; the result of the rewrite typically was a slight power reduction for part of the list (but not sufficient for the request), while INCREASING power levels for other things on the list, and others not yet on it, to where the situation was still as bad, if not worse, than before (sort of like the negotiation process I see in some games of raising your initial sale price, after you feel insulted by the offer being made - "It will cost you 700 gold" - How about 100? - "It will cost you 750 gold"). Needless to say, it didn't work. After letting the book slide backward through the print queue for over a year, it ended up having a replacement written in-house.
4.a. Rumor (never commented on by staff, but by others - at least one of which is now one of the Palladium bashers) has it that one of the artists feature in this person's books got let go for some art issues - like passing off AND SELLING the same piece of art as two different things, for two different books' (one an exoskeleton for a sentient cetacean, the other as a spacecraft), and that his mechanical art was just too wanky, never really matching the writeup (if the writeup came first), or being too odd to actually function on a battlefield, if the art came first. His character art was incredible though - but he practically abandoned drawing people by that point.
5. Another recent vocal complainer was let go after attempting to take Kevin's personal baby (the Fantasy game that started as a heavily home-ruled OD&D campaign in Detroit around 30 years ago) in a direction far different from Kevin's vision for it. And, as RPers, you all should know how GMs react to others trying to mess with their personal campaign setting.
6. As for payment issues, we do have the revelation of embezzling occuring within the company, and the fact that a number of the online orders mysteriously disappearing (or being diverted), apparently by the same person. Evidence seems to indicate the person was intercepting the orders, taking the payment for themselves, then mailing out the order by filling it with stock they'd already stolen from the warehouse (eliminating the record of the transaction in the process). One of the early parts of the investigation involved a query to persons that ordered the Palladium X-mas specials, about delayed/misplaced orders that ended up being shipped from outside Palladium's area of operations.
6.a. One of the things Palladium has always had in its contracts, and so did many other gaming companies, is that payment to an author only occurs if and when the book or article sees print. The persons I have heard the most vocal screams about non-payment from are ones who wanted payment for manuscripts never published, because of failure to comply to editor/publisher decisions and directives. The SAME types of contracts exist for the vast majority of fiction and non-fiction books outside the RPG market, yet one never hears any complaints about this from those writers - because THAT IS HOW THE INDUSTRY OF PUBLISHING WORKS. And, since RPG products tend to use proprietary information, they can't be shopped around to other publishers all that easily (hence the D20 OGL, to make it easier for such products to be done for that system, that aren't limited to one company - but, one can hardly write a book for, say, Freeport, and expect to shop it around if Freeport's owners reject it, without massive changes to genericize ALL the setting material. This is especially true for WotC-owned or licensed settings, though an OGL setting was used to illustrate it.)
6.b. I also remember that one of the D20 companies (was it Green Ronin?) also fell victim to employee theft/embezzling, and that there was one asswipe in the back of the ENnie awards pounding on the table screaming "PAY YOUR AUTHORS!!!" repeatedly - despite the fact that he was NOT one of those authors, just a "friend" of one, according to his comments. And, to PAY even one of those authors in full would have made the company insolvent, and kept any of the others from being paid - the company staying open, and getting more product into the pipeline to generate revenue, was the only way that the authors owed money had a prayer of being paid anything close to what they were owed.
What was it Kosh said about a three-edged sword?
You can hear anything you WANT to hear on the net. Compared to what I've heard from real people, including those on the OTHER side of these debates, I equate most of the net attacks on Palladium with the "Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC because the birds are so gene-modified they don't count as chicken anymore" bullshit - because they have about the same level of factual basis, and similar origins, being from those with some sort of vendetta against the attacked.