An unhealthy concoction I assure you. This is something we often debate about and fight over constantly on Turkish websites, and I must say I was not shocked that the OP herself was also Turkish. Generally arguments go around based on sociologic and politic divides, but I think a historic perspective can paint the clearest picture.
Pictured: Istanbul, The earl One of the obstacles in achieving this was the state of the Turkish honorifics. For those unfamiliar honorifics are basically words like Mr. But they generally come after names in Turkish, rather than before surnames.
I once wrote an answer about pasha , a word generally used for male nobles but some others include bey, Mr. But not in the sense that everyone could call each other pasha but rather becoming a pasha had less to do with nobility and more to do with who you knew.
Honorifics became a symbol of gratification rather than a sign of humility for the speaker and a sign of praise to the nobility. Hence the whole appeal to class equality in the headline from above. Even today a lot of Turkish intellectuals will insist the honorifics existed only so that people could grovel to the elite and the rich, which is a gross oversimplification. Most honorifics in Turkish were post-position as in other oriental cultures such as Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese but also heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic honorifics which were occasionally pre-position.
The desire for furthering westernization led to a pursuit of default pre-position honorifics like those in European languages, especially like English and French. First of course, was the duty of replacing the male honorifics, one to unite them all. For this the word bay pronounced like bye was picked. Despite being an old and somewhat rare word it had continued to see colloquial use in some regions, the literal meaning is something along the lines of rich.
