you are exactly proving the point, the protests seem engineered to make people think they are doing something tantamount to ousting communist dictators when they really don't seem to be doing much at all except maybe annoying the moderates already on their side

I don't know if that's true. Protests - or in fact, any large scale ability to organize people - have the potential for action baked in. Remember that the fall of the USSR started with some relatively mild protests.

It wasn't long before there were Zomo's in the streets of Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and many other places to try to curb those protests and that in turn is what led to the fall of the Polish regime.