Gaming worked for 30 years without DRM, patching was never a problem since Diablo 1 times and pirates never made anyone cry.
So since there is no need, I don't think anyone should be "content" with any level of intrusion, but whatever.
You either haven't been gaming long, or you have really thick nostalgia glasses. Have you forgotten about copy protected floppies, code wheels, and worse; games that made you look up things in the manual randomly during the game or at level changes or to save your game? Enter the 34th word from the 5th paragraph on page 98 to continue playing the game. Then if you accidentally type the wrong word, you lose all progress.
Patching games before the internet was a nightmare. Basically it boiled down to finding someone that was lucky enough to have a newer copy and copying theirs, that is if it didn't have copy protection on the disk.
Then came BBSes, which required you to dial up the companies BBS to download the patch, and footing the bill for long distance charges. Even when the internet became mainstream it was still a pain to keep up to date with patches. We used to have weekly LAN parties here before there was high-speed internet gaming. Not a single session went by when someone had a different version of a game we were trying to play.
Like it or not, without Steam, PC gaming would have died out or we would still be plagued by things like the Sony root kit, Starforce, SecuROM, disk checks and GFWL. Steam is just a distributor, not the problem. They don't force DRM on games sold through their service, but they offer an optional, non intrusive DRM to publishers as part of that service. I would much rather put up with Steam's DRM than any of the previously mentioned DRM so many have forgotten about. Some publishers choose to add extra layers of DRM to their games on Steam, and those publishers don't get my money. Any publisher that chooses to release on GOG too always gets my money.
