[Wardfish]

Ethics
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As far as the ethics is concerned, its within the rules so who cares. Its not like anyone's gonna follow you out to the car-park and beat you up for being unethical. The online cardrooms are raking in massive profits from the rake because they implemented a set of rules that keep the losing players in action for longer. If someone can find and play out a strategy to turn a profit from this then good luck to them.

The only way to stop this is to increase the size of the minimum buy-in, but this will mean that the better players will win a higher proportion of the losers' money, instead of it staying in play longer and being collected in the rake. My guess is the online cardrooms are happy with the staus quo.

Strategy
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I agree with OP (and others) that this is a viable strategy when properly implemented in the right game.

Comments from the deep-stack players like "good players will adjust to it etc etc" miss one major point

ie. a lot of the time the short-stack will be getting all his money in the pot in a position where the (deep-stack) players already in the pot are compelled to call with an inferior/dominated hand (or coin-flip).

I have tried this strategy briefly (at $400NL, $40 in my case) and am convinced it can be very profitable.

However, because you can expect to get called more often than not, it is possible to have a bad run and lose many buy-ins.

Compare this to buying in for $40 at 25c-50c and you will find the variance is much much greater, whereas you can expect the profit to be somewhat greater to a lesser extent. At the lower level, playing a fuller stack , you wouldnt expect a bad run to mean losing as many buy-ins as a bad run playing a short stack.

Other major factor to consider: BOREDOM!!

You need to be focused on the money to want to do this long term, cos you wont get much satisfaction.