No, not you. You're one of the good guys!

OK, I'll go with nitpicker. ;p

It's a vague descriptor, meaning different things to different people. In the case of foruming, I think it can be argued that rationality is universally "good", and you strike me as one of the more rational people on this forum. So yeah, you're one of the "good" guys.

One of us, one of us, heeheeheeheehee.

So basically the only answer is to self-pity in the forums?

Isolated individuals are dirt poor when it comes to influencing macro outcomes.

Only one thing left to do then, I guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCiFO7qV54E

Not uncomfortable. Rather disillusioned. I see the rolling tides around me and know stemming them for the time being is a mere delaying tactic. Eventually everything will be overwhelmed. Did you see that the FCC has killed net neutrality? Despite the roaring outcry against that idea, the ISP lobbyists cash spoke louder.Not enough people care about the good ideals to exact change. We try, and occasionally we win small victories, but the war is a scorched Earth campaign wherein we are giving up ground all too frequently.

I'm tired of fighting the fight that so few really care about. We are a small vocal minority now, even here on GOG. We will be heard, evaluated, and calculated as an acceptable loss in the end, I fear.

I've seen a few of these threads and I still can't get my head around what the problem is. Galaxy is pretty much just an installer, you select the game you want, click download, wait for it to download, then close it and you never have to open it again until you want to download something else.
I honestly can't think of a single advantage the old installer had over it.

Galaxy does not automate the installation of your offline installers. That would be redundant anyway.

The offline installer is a simple solution, really. Download the installer, double click and set up the install folder and accept terms and tell it whether you want shortcuts or not, click install, sit back and enjoy. You can then take this installer to another PC in the household, and another, and to your friend who has the game on GOG but would rather give the installer to him than make him suffer downloading...

Galaxy on the other hand is NOT an offline installer. You need the internet to click 'DOWNLOAD' and to install the game. If you do this on every other PC, say 2 or 3, you download the same game 2 or 3 times, and why when you can already download just one copy of the game and install it on three at the same time?

So the reason why go with the installers over Galaxy? Installations on more than one PC, offline installations as Galaxy will not install a thing offline but offline installers work offline, saving bandwidth...

As PookaMustard said, the advantages to Offline Installers are:-

1. You only need to download a game once, forever. Imagine you have +500 games and have just bought a new PC / HDD / SSD. It's far faster to plug-in an external backup HDD with backed up installers on over a weekend, than to re-download the whole lot over the space of weeks / months, especially if you don't have fibre / unmetered Internet.

2. Longevity guarantee. It may be "DRM-free" but real security comes with truly offline as well. If you rely on a server (any server) and worst case anything happens to GOG and all Galaxy server's get shut down, then what do you do when you need to reinstall? As mentioned before, the key to maintaining a old-game collection is to minimize / eliminate "external dependencies" for re-installing in years to come when brand-specific online services may come and go, not simply swap some of them with others.

3. You maintain control and freedom of choice over your games when potentially inferior "remastered" versions attempt to replace them. Love old Baldur's Gate but not the new one? Like Bioshock 1 but not the "remastered"? Want original Day of the Tentacle to play on a tablet via ScummVM but not the 10x larger remastered version? With offline installers you are 100% guaranteed to keep those originals indefinitely regardless of what publishers of remastered games want you to accept, whilst the store you bought it from may well forcibly "upgrade" your library to only the latter (not just for new purchases, but potentially existing customers if their policy changed for that).

You say "I honestly can't think of a single advantage the old installer had over it" when really the single most biggest long-term advantage to GOG over Steam is precisely the offline installers and the above mentioned advantages they bring. Take that away and it's just "Steam-Lite" with a slightly more reliable "Offline Mode".

Thanks for the in depth reply. I wasn't trying to imply there is no advantage, just simply that I with my limited mind couldn't think of one and hadn't seen anyone actually clarify it before.
My line of thinking was that you need to have an internet connection anyway to download the game, so even the issue of "what if gog shut down or change something about the game" would still apply when using the old installer. It didn't really occur to me that people keep backups of the installer files rather than the actual game files, which I guess makes a lot of sense if you have a lot more to back up than I do.

Not much question that things are going to get a whole lot worse in this world before they get better -- assuming that we somehow manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat -- but there's one thing that leaves me somewhat hopeful: what we "know" is infinitesimally tiny compared to what we don't know.