It's difficult for me to think of the underlying motive for all of those men out there who are complaining about how "exceptionally soft" the women's standards are, so I'll forget about motive and point out some flaws in logic and statistics instead.
If setting the B standard at 2:22 for the men and 2:47 for the women (as it stood for 2008) produced roughly the same amount of qualifiers in each race, then the 2:22 must have been as "soft" for the men as the 2:47 was "soft" for the women. Given that there are currently about the same numbers of men and women running marathons in this country, then having the same number of each gender qualify for their respective Trials represents the same percentage of runners qualifying.
Now it is the case that in 2012 there will be far fewer men in their Trials than women in our Trials, due to the decision by the men to go to a single standard of 2:19. I guess this makes you haters mad, for some reason. Why? Obviously the men's and women's committees have different objectives for their races. And why not? Men have been running competitive marathons since the beginning of the modern Olympic Games; women have been running competitive marathons in the Olympics since 1984. It makes sense for the women's race to be more inclusive until such a time that we have more runners who are capable of running within x minutes of the winner, or the American record, or the world record, or whatever standard you are using for comparison.
One final point: Avocado's Number was putting forth an angry, if somewhat logical, argument until he stated that a faster standard would make for faster times. This is arguable, but then he said that setting the standard at 2:40 would not only produce more sub-2:40 times, but also more sub-2:30 times. What? This is the opposite of what he was arguing prior to this statement. If that's the case, and women will actually run as fast as they are capable of running regardless of how fast they "have to" run in order to make the Trials, then whatever the B standard is set at will have no bearing on how fast the top women runners will run, and little bearing on how fast the "also-rans" will run.