Putting Editors to Trouble (or People of That Sort)

Why are relationships between academic authors and scholarly editors sometimes antagonistic? Do some authors equate an editor with some authoritarian figure, perhaps a teacher from their schooldays, and expect them to mark and praise a paper whatever its faults? Or are authors still undergraduates at heart, with a poor respect for simple rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and do they object to their best ideas' being criticized by 'teacher'?