You just caught him on an off day.
Divine right of kings lasted for a long long long time, and caused the deaths of untold millions
Due to the uniquely fucked up way music licensing works, it's likely they license the lyrics through a separate company than the music and probably don't even directly license it themselves (Tidal for example uses Musicmatch's lyric library and api). There's a cost associated with this that is likely outside their control. It's shitty, but it is plalusibly reasonable they implemented this as a cost savings measure.
Capitalism has scribbled right over the "social good" bits of that. We can pretty much single handedly thank Disney and lobbying.
They don't brick shit, don't lie. It not booting until you swap the part back to a verified part isn't even remotely close to a full bricking.
Physical games are a lie. What you want is drm free digital games! Best of all worlds.
Although we don't see it, all of these developments do actually eventually make their way into battery tech. The batteries of today are not the batteries of 2014.
Half the tool chains
OP, just change your encryption key to whatever you have your password as and set your login to auto login. This will give you the experience you desire as it'll decrypt the disk with your password and log you in automatically once it's decrypted, but if you lock the system (close the lid. Screen lock. Etc) you'll still get a login screen as normal. (Just keep in mind they're technically two separate passwords and will unfortunately need to be changed separately if you do change your password).
Just the idea that you can force yourself onto another countries road and tell them you don't need a license/etc is so narcissistic it's crazy lol.
You're the one with exorbitant usb needs. That means you'll be the one who expansions are made for. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I'd wager the vast vast majority of pc users don't use beyond 4.
As a system admin I can sympathize, but honestly I don't see any resolution that will fix this in the short or longterm. You just have to accept that the reality of computing is that if you interact with external data in a way that runs unfriendly code, you can/probably will compromise your system. It's just a consequence of making rocks smart.