I rolled my eyes as soon as I saw "analogy", but this one is surprisingly apt. You make some very good points there.
In fact, it very much explains GOG's policy: they basically say you don't have to lock your door at all if you don't have anything all that valuable (nostalgia value put aside) and just trust people around to be nice. I'm happy to see it works even in this insanely huge and varied neighbourhood that is the internet.

In all honesty, i liked the widgets analogy best. At least it explains why so many people run around with a few widgets short of a full set - damn that store alpha and its unwilligness to sell widgets of assorted colors.
What, no fancy dinner and movies first?

My favorite so far was comparing "It isn't bypassing DRM if I don't use a crack" to "I'm still a virgin if he only does me in the butt", but to each his own.
But we digress. Neither of these statements really had anything to do with the topic at hand.

With sales like that you would think they could afford full time staff by now.
Back on topic : Most games are available as 0day releases therefore I'm not sure DRM helps them at all. Price as always is the key, I know that I almost never by a game unless it's heavily discounted.
We are actually reaching a stage I think where DRM is actually starting to directly hurt sales(Ubisoft here's looking at you kid). I noticed settlers 7 has already made it on to a budget label, but even at a modest price I have no interest in it with that infestation intact, shame cus it's a nice game too!

That doesn't make sense, I'm afraid. Although I'm sure there are publishers who do see it that way (they release games with that crap after all).
For that to make sense they'd have to be releasing games with more integrated forms of DRM that are harder to break. Not releasing game after game with the same DRM scheme that increasingly impose on the rights of legitimate buyers.
Imposing further restrictions on the end user doesn't, by itself, make the DRM harder to break. It does however increase the number of people who are going to feel the need to crack it, pirate it or simply not buy it. Its impact on sales can only be negative.

Actually, using a different form of DRM period makes a pretty big difference. Most cracks are for the NA/EU versions. So that either means an import version must be used as the base (which won't sell as well, since our friends don't actually KNOW English or French) or more effort needs to be put into generating and/or obtaining the crack.
Plus, many of these more "draconian" DRMs were less easily cracked (Starforce has many versions that I think might STILL be "uncrackable" to the extent that none of the groups have bothered to go back). In fact, much of the animosity toward DRM comes from people who think that DRM will destroy their systems and the like, which are generally propagated when people somehow screw up bypassing Starforce (look it up and laugh :p) or get a virus when they try the ninety million fake cracks that come during the first wave.
So, in essence, their "stricter" nature makes them more prone to anger from the community (not to sound like a tinfoil hat, but I suspect that much of the animosity and horror stories will spawn from the warez scene), which in turn makes them less likely to be used in NA/EU (nobody cares about you, Australia :p), which in turn makes them viable alternatives for Eastern Europe.
DISCLAIMER: That is not to say that all the animosity toward DRM is misplaced. But I am sure we have all had moments where we made mountains out of mole hills.
As for the second half of your post: That is where we disagree ideologically, and I am not really in the mood to argue against "But, DRM is evil. It is all a conspiracy of the evil corporations to force us to not give them money" and you probably don't want to argue against what you perceive as "Give Kotick oral sex!"

We all know how gamers, esp. older gamers like us, know so much better about the video game market and the impact of DRM on this market than the marketing dudes at the head of video games companies with billions in turnover.

Indeed, managing customers is a major priority. Loss of an imaginary sale to somebody that wasn't going to buy the game anyway isn't the main focus. Stopping the secondary sale or transfer by the paying customer is much more important.
The goal is to get even more money out of the paying customers rather than to try to get more money out of the non-paying customer. It isn't a bad plan from the publishers perspective, it is bad for the paying customer. When it gets too bad, the paying customer pushes back and the DRM restrictions are lessened for a while.
SO DRM free can work on a large scale, but you can usually make even more money by squeezing the paying customer by adding DRM. Hence DRM works 'more better' from the publishers view.

Yeah it's not the store that's so horrific, it's the library format. If the DB is in good shape and you don't need to sync it across computers, it's a pretty neat dynamic music library.
It shouldn't be a book library and an app store and a movie library at the same time though, that's where it all really starts to fall apart.
I've had to do way too much maintenance on my iTunes libraries these days... good thing I know a trick about how to rebuild the database, after hand-editing the XML...

I think that a lot of it is down to people putting two and two together and getting five. Fact 1: my old unbranded CD drive finally broke. Fact 2: Some game I bought had DRM. Conclusion: DRM be killin' ma drives!
That said, there have been DRM implementations that have been outright malware. Retail Bioshock was a trojan. No two ways around it, that shit was virused up to the eyeballs. It was even detected by many AVs as having a virus. So because 2K had intentionally distributed it with said malware, rather than recall it, they had to coax AV devs to overlook it in future updates.
Yet, technically that used SecuROM which can also be used for completely non-invasive disc checks or completely transparent DRM used for DD titles. Neither of which I have a problem with (typically. But Crysis had to be cracked after months of EA's attempts to sort it out including giving me an EA store version which also didn't work).
I don't see DRM as evil. Partly because I don't live in some comic book world where evil exists. Partly because it's just software. But mostly because I just don't give that much of a shit to get all righteous about it. I will avoid any title that contains anything detrimental (either to the game or my system) and I will voice my opinions on it where relevant. But generally that's all it amounts to. I don't have an anti-DRM agenda like some people here. I just see it for what it is.
As for Kotick, I've got no love for the guy. That much is true. But I don't consider Activision to be at the forefront of shitty DRM schemes. But maybe that's because nothing they've done of late has been interesting enough to me for me to look further into it.

I think I'll stick with Foobar...

It depends on whether or not they're going to get more from people who would have bought it second hand than they're losing from people who would have bought it first hand had it not been for all the bullshit they had to deal with piecing the jigsaw puzzle of a game together from all the 0 day cut content. If a game starts out at £35 and can go down to £10 within a year, I'd say they better be damn sure it's worth the sacrifice.

True. Nowdays DRM main goal is to minimize secondary market of games and not fighting with piracy. At present after you buy a game which requires STEAM account it's not a product you own - it's a some kind of service you are entitled to use. Putting aside legal aspects -you can't simply transfer (sell, borrow, offer) the game you paid for. I personally don't like it but seeing a big success of STEAM - that's the future.

I haven't looked into the details of Bioshock's version of Activation Model Securom versus the other ones used. Could you provide a link to a good site about it?
And actually, most of the more annoying DRMs will show up as a trojan if you think about it. You run a program, it phones home to a server and either uploads data or downloads data to verify. Hell, I think Punkbuster occasionally got false-positived'd.
Apologies. I misinterpreted your spreading of the Good Word as being an opinion or agenda :p

No. You mistook my writing an opinion for proselytising. No, actually that's not true. You didn't at all. But you thought it would be a bad idea to give up twisting words and antagonising people.

Apologies. I guess speaking about an opinion that you believe to be factual in a manner that depicts said belief as fact is in no way designed to convert or attempt to convert other people to your line of thought.
Seriously though, I was just pointing out the hilarity of you claiming that yours is fact and acting as though you were a great sage as being hilarious. Try not to take yourself so seriously and just have a laugh every once in a while :p
Also: Honestly, anyone who has ever been in a discussion or debate is a proselytizer. Nobody shares their opinion without the goal of at least attempting to convert others to their line of thought. Anything less would be masturbation