I agree that the petitioning is a tad of an overreaction but if it helps them sleep at night then hey-ho.
SQA don't really care and if the paper is actually harder than expected/ not what you had actually been taught then they'll lower the grade boundaries because the difficulty/improper choice of questions will be reflected in the general trend of marks; not because of a petition on change.org and a BBC News article.
Again, however democratic society free-speech etc etc people will do as they please irrespective of the reality of the situation.
I sat Higher maths last year and thought I had royally fudged it up - and the plentiful news articles and petitions reinforced this fear - but somehow sailed through in August w/ an A. I think this whole petition culture seems to only further the concerns it's trying to quash.
SQA are gonna continue putting out exam papers that don't directly reflect the course, pupils are going to continue getting mad, and August will roll around each year to separate the over concerned pupils who did study from the mob mentality individuals who simply wanted to mask the fact they largely neglected revising.
People always complain that what we learn in school is never going to be used in the "real world" yet when an exam mirrors the unpredictability and lateral thinking the real world requires, they suddenly begin to incite a revolutionary uprising against the SQA. Life doesn't come with a how to pass book folks, and neither did AH Biology this year but let's forget about the early implementation of courses with little study materials available that teachers are unsure how to teach and complain that I had to do some Maths in my Biology exam, despite that being a clear and obvious requirement of the course. (Not a direct attack on this years adv. Bio, the paper was pretty awesome imo but the SQA teaching guidelines left my teacher puzzled for most of the year.)