Something I should have asked before going off on this rant is "Are there any other DAZ Central-only/DIM-only items in the DAZ store?". To the best of my knowledge, there aren't, but if there are, I'd love to know what they are and what the reasoning was for making it so.

DAZ's encryption scheme failed because it provided absolutely no benefit to the customer (just the opposite, in fact) -- it was entirely in DAZ's favor in that it made the content impossible to pirate, while making it impossible for the customer to back-up locally. Encryption didn't make the content cheaper, more stable, prettier to look at, easier to use, etc. -- there was absolutely no benefit to the customer, while imposing a lot of new restrictions on them. It was simply bound to fail.

So DAZ won't attempt such a move again until they can convince the customer that it's to their (the customer's) advantage, or at least until they can plausibly demonstrate that the customer doesn't care one way or the other. And to do that, they'll want the numbers to tell a certain story. I believe that if they can get a simple majority of their download traffic over a certain span of time (say, 50.1% or greater over three months or so) to be through the clients (which they can do by enticing their customers with perks, goodies, and hard-to-resist offerings -- "purchase and install the new Genesis 9 figures through DC/DIM and get 50% off"), then that will be all the pretext they need to start phasing out the manual downloads, and at that point, you can kiss goodbye to your control over the content you paid for.

Remember when DAZ tried jumping into the 3D printing market? They restricted everyone's accounts until they agreed to the updated EULA -- you couldn't download your purchased files until you agreed to the new terms DAZ was imposing.

Now imagine six months or a year has passed since DAZ started phasing out the manual downloads. Everyone is now accustomed to using the clients to install their content, and no one is backing up anything to disc, partly because they're being incentivized not to do so and partly because that option no longer exists. In a situation like that, would you even notice if DAZ quietly started encrypting your content again? Or what if, after that six months or a year or so, you go to log into the store or fire up DAZ Studio on your computer, and you get slapped in the face with a demand that you submit to a newly updated EULA -- and one imposing content encryption -- before you can access your content?

THAT'S what I think is coming.