On the other random hand, its nice to be able to read a set of patchnotes when an update goes out.. and not have ambiguous things like 'fighters r better now' or 'some balance changes'
That's why we do them -- having been on the other side of stupid, short, and ambiguous patch notes in other games. I was never into EVE, but most other RTS games I've played have all been pretty guilty of this sort of thing.
Granted, a mass audience probably doesn't want 30,000 words of detail per patch release. But in my case that's easily solvable with the summaries that we created upon official releases.