I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.

Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.

While VAC is indeed far from competent at detecting all but the most rudimentary cheats, it is so by design. When the first third party CSGO matchmaking/league services decided to use kernel level AC, Valve publically said they would personally not do such a thing. I can't remember if any exact reasons were named at the time, but I do think it's a fair take on their end. It's not like they're locking developers into using VAC anyway.

Furthermore, more recently they have debuted VACNet, which uses machine learning, most likely to recognize certain patterns and behaviors associated with cheating. Probably still avoidable if one were to use subtle settings and knows how to act properly. But it shows they haven't given up and are trying to explore alternative methods at least. I'm admittedly not familiar with how successful it has been as I have not been playing or even following the game for a long time.

I don't know what sort of artists you know, but of all the artists I know, nobody is "completely fine" with tracing. It is okay but still frowned upon when people do it for "practice" without publishing the result, but anything that even looks remotely like it is traced gets called out and further investigated incredibly quickly.

And as for fan art, a lot of companies explicitly allow art based on their IP, as long as it's used/published by the artists themselves and the commercial rights to the work aren't sold to some other company. In Japan, there is a whole industry based around derivative works, Doujin - self-published works, that works off of what is essentially a code of honor. Companies don't go against the artists, as long as said artists adhere to certain guidelines on what they're allowed to depict (eg. no NSFW content.) Many franchises have become a lot more popular due to fan art/derivative works alone (ie. Touhou Project, Fate Series.)

As a hobbyist musician even I notice Live's flaws. And while it does indeed get out of your way most of the time, when it doesn't you can't change it and it becomes frustrating. While other larger players in the industry are farther ahead, just how far behind Live really is becomes especially apparent when you look at Reaper. They're fundamentally different in their approaches, yes. But Reaper's pace for adding new features and how up-to-date they are in terms of the changing landscape of the industry (CLAP plugins, ARA2 support, etc.) is impressive considering their small team. But Ableton's focus with Live seems to be more towards adding content rather than features or large overhauls. At least that's my impression.

I genuinely love Live's workflow. It feels the most natural to me. But the ever growing list of annoyances and shortcomings make me look into other DAWs fairly frequently. Though sadly no other one has really stuck with me so far.

"Radios" in Spotify are a shadow of their former self anyway. They used to be a theoretically infinite list of songs that you could up and down vote, which would then influence the next songs to be added. Now it's just a playlist of stuff Spotify deems similar and you essentially just have to deal with it.

Discovery via their radio used to be great. Whenever I tried it more recently it was kind of awful. I've switched off of Spotify many times over the past few years, only to regrettably come back and be disappointed again.

I wish Apple would just make a proper cross platform Apple Music client, then I could switch in peace. All the other alternatives lack some of the more obscure artists I listen to regularly. And while I try to purchase as much as I can, not everything is available digitally and I don't really want to import CDs from the other side of the world.