“…because I can write directly to the colleague who published this work…”
This practice often violates publisher’s copyright laws and therefore may be illegal.
As I wrote elsewhere, as long as scientists get all the papers they want, most of them won’t give a shit. Until, that is, the whole system breaks down and every scientist is confined to those journals his or her institution can actually afford.
That just won’t happen because Open Access is changing the publishing landscape in a way that publishers simply can’t afford to limit access, because it would put them out of business very quickly. The Open Access movement is, in essence, a bunch of people working their asses off so that the majority can blissfully go on with not giving a shit.