Some of us knew this 30 years ago

I already explained above what I was talking about - about equal comparison (which should be evaluated by the publisher). Your comparison is not equal, i.e. you aren't talking about DRM vs no DRM, you are talking about existing services which use DRM on publishers' terms. I'm challenging the sanity of these terms, you ignore them and say that service has good usability as is. That wasn't the point.