Your post is right on target. It is plain and simple extortion by lawsuit. Greedy lawyers have learned that any thing that happens they can somehow trace to a faulty product, negligence, or poor training. They pick juries who are likely to "punish" rich businesses and "reward" the poor individual.
They don't realize how much freedom we lose in products and services not being offered, stupid zero tolerance policies, and all sorts of other inanities designed to CYA against lawsuits.
And you can't have greedy lawyers without greedy plaintiffs. These threads invevitably turn into lawyer bashing threads, but somebody *hired* the lawyer. If greedy people would quit giving lawyers just this kind of work, they would be put out of business.