I get frustrated by this every time someone mentions the classic short story The Cold Equations (full text here). The premise of the story is a classic trolley problem (...In Space!), where a small spaceship carrying much-needed medical supplies gets a stowaway, which throws off its mass calculations. If the stowaway is not ejected into space, the ship will crash and the people on the planet will die of a plague. So the (innocent, lovable) stowaway is killed and ejected, and the day is saved. The end.

Whenever this comes up, somebody will attack the story as contrived, pointing out that it could have been prevented by some "Keep Out" signs and a few more door locks. This is usually treated as an excuse to dismiss the premise of the story entirely -- exactly what you describe as a common reaction to maximally inconvenient trolley problems.

(By the way, I searched on Less Wrong for previous discussions of The Cold Equations, and was pleasantly surprised that people around here seem much less inclined to use the story's plot holes as an excuse to dismiss the whole idea. The nits still get picked, but not to a facepalm-worthy extent.)