I think that's a bit different, and would totally be supporting Palmer if she was doing the same thing. He bypassed the distribution method, but still handled the production himself (or behind the scenes with a loan). Palmer asked people to pay (what seems like an exorbitant amount of money) to fund her making an album, and is now asking people to be her band for free when she tours.
In the grand scheme of things, it honestly don't really bug me that much. Like I said before, I actually liked The Dresden Dolls quite a bit. I think I've just had weird experiences personally with kickstarter related things, and probably have more of a negative perception of the whole thing than I should. Like HG wrote, I'm sure there are a lot of good uses of that sort of model as well. I've unfortunately seen a handful of sketchy ones.