They could require us to register our games (via a form of proof of purchase) in order to obtain the English package.
Yes, but that'd be taken advantage of by pirates as well. The English package would just be spread around in the same fashion as the game itself is right now. Unfortunate as it may be, you're probably not going to find a way to make something piracy-proof. Given enough time, I'm sure any means of security could eventually be cracked. Some of these pirates are extremely knowledgable.
the rather tedious procedure to hack English into the game
It's actually quite the opposite of difficult. From what I've seen, it looks like you just copy/paste a file and make a small change to a registry value. It also seems that many people are
not experiencing these bugs that are supposed to plague a language hacked version. It actually seems as though those who got the game legitimately are having more problems than the pirates somehow.
