If I may be frank, we didn't ask the community when we changed it to the Inferno Squad logo, either. But that went over fine.
We don't need to ask the community every time we make visual changes to the subreddit. We've held a couple banner contests recently, sure, but for the most part, the visual changes to the subreddit have been at the moderators' discretion. We chose and created the entire subreddit CSS styling, all our banners prior to the Grievous one (the first one we held a contest for), our header text, our fancy sidebar functions, and all of our mobile icons up to this point. Usually the community is fine with what we do.
Clearly, this time, they were not, and we reverted our change. But I disagree with the implication that we should've seen this reaction coming, and that this whole mess is our fault for not asking first.