I understand how they are constructed, I've supported them in the past. What I quarrel with is the splitter aspect and the additional equipment that inevitably appears between the subscriber and the final termination point--be that a splitter, be that yet another patch that could fail inside another cabinet along the line in the middle of nowhere.

If you're going to make p2p home runs, just do it. Support the equipment in the first place at the CO to make that possible, rather than installing splitters then ripping out those splitters, patching things back up. Remove the intermediate cabinets. At that point you may as well just provide raw ethernet. What was the point of the PON nonsense then?

PON is a stop-gap technology that's outlived its usefulness, if it ever was there before. It's a crutch and should be retired.