I disagree, firstly on your call to stop complaints. Anyone should be able to question the status quo. Secondly, I disagree on treating paywalled links the same way "normal" links are treated because this breaks functions of the web. I dislike sites that allow indexing but hide the content from users of indexing sites, like scribd, which contents can be found on a search, but is behind a paywall when you try to access it. This breaks search engines, and this breaks HN. This practice breaks other sites and uses them as advertising spots.
Paywalls might arguably break Hacker News (although that's debatable) but they certainly do not break search engines. The job of a search engine is to index all content. It makes no guarantee that you will not have to pay for the content it indexes. It only claims that the content it finds is relevant to your search.
