What is the difference between a symbol and an exemplar?

In another thread appeared the following by Robin Linden:
I read a couple of things into that statement:

1) Linden Lab believes there is something wrong with the land system and barrony
2) Linden Lab acknowledges that Anshe is a focal point of many discussions on the subject

Of course, I may be reading far too much into one sentence, but when policy is capricious, one needs to resort to "kremlin-watching" to attempt to figure out what's going on. If points (1) and (2) are correct, then why do they not come to the conclusion:

3) Maybe Linden Lab ought to do something about Anshe

or, put another way, is Anshe a symbol or symptom of the problem or is she the cause of these problems? A few Anshe supporters notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that so many people could be so utterly wrong about the conduct of one player.

N.B. I have never had any contact with Anshe outside the forums and don't really care how much money she makes or doesn't. The signs are globally obnoxious, though.

A symbol isn't the thing, it's a thing that represents the thing itself.
An exemplar is one of a class of things that demonstrates all the important atributes of that class of things.
I'll leave others to decide if certain people are symbols, exemplars, or both.

Leaving my opinon about Anshe out of this, I'll say that something is wrong. I dislike that one player can have such a large impact on the gaming experience of so many others. Philip Linden said that there are 17,000 players in SL. I don't know if the econ data spreadsheets show how much players spend on membership and land tier each month, but I imagine it's a significant number. I'd guess that any particular land baron pays only a small percentage of what LL takes in on the game each month, yet they wield influence far out of proportion with that. Why can a handful of people so screw up the gaming experience of thousands of others who pay far more for the use of the game?

My own answer to my rhetorical question is that land barony is making good profits for LL. If you look at the land auctions, many of them have bidding wars with land barons. Just looking at Anshe, I see her bidding on many auctions that she didn't care enough about to stay in to the end. Often she just bumps the price way up then bows out after the other bidder beats her price. A different baron did something to me in a recent auction - I had to pay several thousand lindens more just cause she felt she had to try to mess with a parcel of land that was completely surrounded by my own. I'm sure the combined effect of the land barons on auctions get the Lindens a noticable increase in land prices. And the amount of land that barons hold in-world keeps the price artificially inflated too, also keeping auction prices higher.

I suspect we won't see LL do anything to solve the land baron problem until it is in their economic interest to do so.