I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.
It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I'm pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.
What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I'm not a mod, but I was fed the line 'it's going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps'. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department