badtimes 'Gotten' is mainly used in American English, but that does not mean everyone using the word picked it up from the American usage - like many American words, it used to be more common in British English, but has just fallen out of use over the centuries.
I keep reading this on here, but surely its still wrong to use it in the present tense as some ubiquitous substitute for the word "got"?
"Gotten" is past tense (and maybe a plural?) - it describes someone having got something already. I wonder (and I am a language pedant) if it is something to do with the word "got" and its derivative tenses being problematic in English (being encouraged to use "I have" instead of "I got" and so on). It sounds clumsy, because it has lost its prefix "be". If we still said "I have begot", it would sound much more polite. But English has dropped its prefixes (unlike other Germanic languages) so we can't. So we search around for something nicer, and "gotten" is a bit longer, so that gets stuck in instead.
As pointed out above, we have no such problems with "forgotten" or "forget", because they retain their prefixes.