There are, after all, many legitimate reasons for having access to the contact list and there are many legitimate reasons for not wanting to share it. In android, as a developer, you have to decide whether you want a fully featured app or an app that respects their users privacy. You can not have both in a single app.

There is nothing that says you can't have both and doing so would be very simple. Android doesn't do anything to help so that's why android needs some serious blame for this.

Now people are getting used to ignoring the permissions (if all apps require everything, why bother?) making them quite useless. If this continues they could just as well just remove them (since the typical user wouldn't care anyway).