There's a guy at my running club who is one of the toughest, hardest blokes I have ever met. He told me he had one of those massages on his calf once that made him cry!
my mate does this sort of thing for a living and he reckons the thing with deep tissue massage is that if it hurts someone then the masseur is doing it wrong .... seems to be this perception that you have to push as hard as you can in some form of test of strength but by doing so all you are doing is pushing the muscle down onto the bone thus creating that pain sensation (or something like that , I have a very short attention span to learning new stuff)
Obviously if you push the muscle onto the bone then its going to hurt like ****, on the other hand, if you massage a muscle that hurts anyway with an amount of pressure then its going to hurt like **** also.
To sum it up, either way it hurts like ****!
But yes, i agree with what your saying GT.