By analogy, if I invoke several theorems and lemmas to do a mathematical proof rather than killing myself by deriving them again, then I must not be having fun because I'm just plugging into magic incantations.

Errrr... no. These "shortcuts" improve productivity for both programmers and mathematicians and that's good. Getting down to nuts and bolts is also good because it promotes understanding.

Moving on...

You're not going back far enough.

As someone who has played C&C since the original, Tiberian Sun was the worst of the first four games (C&C 1 and 2, RA 1 and 2), so it's not surprising that you might think the new games are better. But you'd be wrong... the other three games are terrific. The feel of C&C1 and RA1 have never been surpassed. I still play RA2, which is also great fun.

Actually, no. We've been outraged about that before. It's one thing if I use someone's server and it typojacks me due to a wildcard entry in the name tables. The alleged behavior we're discussing actually prevents* the user from using another nameserver outside of that ISP in order to sidestep the problem.
* (well, makes more difficult, requiring tunneling or something like that)

For quite awhile I've had the feeling that DNS will eventually be brokered through P2P/DHTs/etc with digitally signed payloads, and this type of behavior only makes that idea more appropriate.