Good post, insightful and interesting.
For me, I couldn't ever get on board with it. Have supported United since just before Fergie took over, and after about a month of Moyes I found myself starting to want him out because I knew how it was gonna play out (ok, I didn't actually know, but I felt very sure).
I felt sorry for him toward the end, with the plane banner and all that. I didn't like how you could see the stress was just flattening him.
That said, if I'm honest, I started to feel an actual resentment toward the club for making such a fecking idiotic decision - I felt, for the first time, that Utd was an out of touch institution that had become so bloated and detached from reality that it (the club itself) deserved the shit results and the embarrassment. Sounds bitter, but at the time that's how I felt.
I knew that the club needed to learn from it, and I wanted that to happen (the learning).
The pity you talk about was definitely there for me too, in my case it may have slightly prolonged my support for him in a roundabout way. What I mean is that, in here specifically, I thought a lot of the abuse he got was OTT. Its a delicate thing because a lot of it was completely deserved, he was out of his depth, he was shit, he was maddening. So it was completely justified and natural that there was a cacophony of anti-Moyes sentiment. Very occasionally it spilt over into territory that was undeserved. I am thinking in particular of the baying abuse he got after every single interview he did, when every word he said, and every facial gesture, was twisted and used as evidence that he was a loser. I think in retrospect I concluded more of it was undeserved than actually was. Some of those comments and facial gestures DID show he was a loser. (And my eureka moment, or one of them, was mentioned above, when he said even SAF would have been in the same situation he was, in March, when we were 7th. At which point there was no defending the shit he was coming out with.)
But that isnt the biggest part of it. The biggest part of it was just that I thought - my God, how many times have I typed this sentence over the past few years, especially the first few after SAF left, but even in the years before he left - any manager following SAF was destined to fail. In the short term at least. So maybe fail is the wrong word: struggle. I was (and to some extent still am) a fully signed up believer in the Poisoned Chalice Theory. So I thought his struggles were inevitable, and therefore it was a question of fairness that he be allowed to ride it out.
To qualify the above, I think with someone like Mourinho the poisoned chalice thing wasnt actually inevitable. But we needed someone bloody strong to come in and quite honestly I dont know how many other people could have done it, regardless of ability. It really was a bloody difficult job coming here after SAF, I know some people still think this is bollocks and everything was set and all it took was someone competent to keep things as they were but I will never agree with that. The difference is, a better manager would (maybe, we will never know) have managed our decline a little better, contained it. I think the pressure of it destroyed Moyes and the situation was made worse than it had to be - for him and for us - because he was so far out of his depth. So yes, I do and did feel some pity for him, but he has been a graceless prick since he left and he was a deeply uninspiring candidate in the first place.