My description is accurate. I have just been normally using the computer. Even without any swap, the HDD goes "krrrrrr..." and the system becomes very unresponsive when you begin to run out of memory. You can easily try it yourself, as it is reproducible every time.

It seems to throw out program pages from memory if it knows that they are disk-backed. It seems to be hard to trigger the OOM killer in this condition as well, even though it should happen.

I have a Sharp R-5000E which has been trucking for couple of decades.

There are other problems in the memory subsystem as well. For example, if you are not using swap and the system begins to run out of memory, it starts throwing out pages of active programs from memory. Very soon they are loaded again from disk when those parts are needed. This causes a disk-grinding circus that feels like swapping.

Do not talk about unfinished stuff that is still in planning or development. Developing modern things is complex, and that's fine, but it's hard to keep the excitement alive for 5 years. Same goes for SteamBoxes. Same goes for Peter Molyneux's new game Godus, of which people got incredibly angry because it could not deliver this or that thing that was hyped earlier. The trendy "open development" strategy does not come without problems.

Even those issues have mostly been fixed in subsequent patches.

It wouldn't make a good campfire story. We did also see a bright orb of light and a hear distant animal howl, didn't we?

One of their core ideologies is to be DRM-free. Breaking that promise would upset a lot of customers, so it's unlikely that they are going to do it.

Daikatana seems to be the "Ribbon interface" of games. It's the game everyone has learned to whine about, but in reality there is not anything terribly bad about it.

Daikatana has overly bad reputation. SiN has overly good reputation. They both are on the same line. Not best shooters on the planet, but still quite nice snacks. There are waaay worse games than those.

Daz Loader is good, but it does not support UEFI installations, because of the GPT partition format.

What comes to OEM installations, with some trickery there is also a possibility to feed the BIOS SLIC key to Windows Software Licensing Management Tool. This allows to install without an OEM-specific installation media, and it's also legal as you're using the legitimate key from the sticker.