I don't mean to claim that the players or DM are doing it wrong for liking or using the monk class. That would be fairly hypocritical of me, I've used and had some fun with a couple monk multiclass blends, myself. Reviewing my own analogy, I suppose I can see how it would look that way, though that wasn't my intent either. The guys running around clubbing people with knife pommels or gun grips are still hurting people with tools designed to hurt people, they aren't, strictly speaking, doing it wrong -- they're just doing it far less efficiently than what those weapons are capable of at their best. If/when they opt to go for more efficient use, the guy with the brass knucks probably winds up looking and feeling bad, because he can't accomplish anything like as much as they can.
What I think is important is to acknowledge, even if you like and use monks, that the monk is not in fact a very effective class. It's just not very good. The reason I think this is important to acknowledge, even if you don't do much with it, is because it helps to avoid batshit insane misguided reasoning later. Using another poorly-designed and unpopular class as an example, fighter gets wrongly used as a measuring stick way too often by people that don't accept that it's a bad class. I wouldn't presume to know exact numbers, nor global proportions, but at least among the posters here, I feel safe to say more of us have heard "That splatbook/prestige class is overpowered, it's WAY better than the fighter" from a DM than haven't. That's absurd, and it shouldn't ever be a reason somebody can't play what they'd like to.
Getting back to the monk, what happens if you start a new game and the usual suspects decide to try getting a bit more out of their usual styles, and the fist-fighting fan decides he wants to give unarmed swordsage a go? If monk is accepted as a good class and valid measuring stick, what's the brawling initiator when measured against it?