I have to agree about Jurrasic Park, I used to repair Pinball machines back in the mid 90's and it was a horrible machine to work on and had the highest call rate of any pin we ever had sited. I used to hate working on Data East machines in general. Bally Williams of that era were always the most engineer friendly machines to work on though, they had some pretty good built in diagnostics and were reasonably well put together (apart from Dr Who which was a bag of crap with that thing that was supposed to rise out of the playfield but used to jam most of the time)

Why bother, just wait for the inevitable crack to remove the protection completely, like we do for all forms of existing game DRM. Do these game publishers who insist on doing the same thing over and over again honestly expect different results each time?

Well that might be true for single player only games but in this case anyone who does use a pirate copy will invariably miss out on the multi player side of the game. But yes, it is an option if you don't want the full experience and are prepared to pay for it. What I do when I want to play a single player game that has draconian DRM I buy a second hand copy and use the inevitable crack, that way I get a legit copy of the game and the publishers that push this crap don't get my money, I did this just last week for Dead Space.