As former Email Principal at major provider, sure, they run into blacklisting problems.

However, most of time, it's not that providers are blacklisting because "Ha ha ha, screw the little guy" but more "Yea, they are hosting on IP blocks with terrible reputation and spammers are absolute liars. I refuse to trust whatever they say, period."

If you have your own /24 or greater, you can become email provider. It's also just such a low margin business, it's not worth small businesses disrupting it.

I have found that if you harsh blacklist from most countries you'll never communicate from you'll save a lot of spam.

I blacklisted pretty much all of africa and arabic nations and china on the IP level, ( ensure you get the bgp routed datacenters in those nations too) and not only did i get less spam, but less automated bot attacks on my webserver.

The reason people talk about the blacklist is because its just so damn effective.