guesssingo: You seem to be assuming that indie developers are mostly entrepreneurs, and applying undergrad business logic to them. I'd argue that the average indie developer has a lot more in common with community artists (painters, hand-weavers, sculptors, mosaic artists, poets, etc) that survive on grants, personal patronage from wealthy members of the community, and gallery admission fees or commissions (these guys and gals, even if fairly successful, generally are not making bank).
Kickstarters and the like are analogous to a crowd-driven version of arts patronage that was common in centuries past by wealthy merchants, nobles, kings, and bishops. In my opinion this is an extremely important option for funding indie developers, because anyone who has looked into the revenues and profit margins of indie game development knows that they're not amazing. Unless you're deluded enough to think you're the next Notch, game developers that are in it for the money will quickly move on to much more profitable and stable jobs in other areas of software development.
Frankly, many of the games that are put up on Kickstarter are far too niche to receive loans and angels without proof that there is a paying market for them; and some are just far too niche to even have a chance at turning a profit in the open marketplace at all. Kickstarters are not there to turn a profit for the people pledging because the people pledging are not investors; they are patrons!
Simply put, some of the games on Kickstarter could only be made via patronage because they do not follow established market trends or are not commercially viable at all. At the end of the day, it's up to you to do your due diligence on whether you want to be a patron/donator for a project, but don't begrudge other people for reviving a funding model to support things they love.