While I don't exactly agree with you, I must commend you. You expressed your points in such a way as almost no one on your side is capable.
Now, I understand that for every one person who, through no fault of their own, drops $60-$100 on a coaster (failed install, repair install, uninstall-reinstall, oops, no more installs!), tens of people have no problem what so ever. But that is not the issue here.
The issue isn't even "the steady erosion of consumer rights," as according to the EULA thats been shipping with even console games for the last decade or so, the consumer never had any rights to start.
The issue is companies are going out of their way to punish their paying, loyal customers in the name of fighting theft of their intellectual property. While the people who actually steal intellectual property are actually being rewarded with improved performance and hassle-free gameplay. They don't even have to juggle discs, which makes even installing exponentially faster.
While in a perfect psychological sense, this would function to create animosity towards thieves of intellectual property in your loyal customers, it assumes two things. That loyal customers will ever be able to affect the situation or the customers won't realize the publisher is the one who's punishing them.
So we have large corporations attempting to turn their customers into their own personal army for sake of their bottom line by punishing them through devoting excessive amounts of money and time towards the creation of copy protection code. While these lines of code are edited in a few hours by people who view each new copy protection algorithm as a fun new puzzle to solve. That is the issue. That is the problem. That is why DRM needs to just stop.
Also, console piracy is pretty ridiculous as well.