The difference is in the democracy of it all. Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans. Scrounge up ten bucks and a web connection and it's yours. TLDs aren't even close. It's a total plutocracy and ICANN seems totally unapologetic about it while the companies snatching them up look ridiculous when they put a line in their proposal about how their ownership of some random word as a TLD is in our, the users, best interest.

How can anyone overlook that? It's practically beating us over the head, taunting us.

Maybe those domains shouldn't have been issued, but they were. And that's why you want to deal with these things before you get an installed base, not after.