I shall continue to rip my purchased BDs with DVDAnywhereHD. I'f I'm entitled to a digital copy anyway, forcing me to go through all of the hoops above is just adding wasted time to my already short life.

You can always get Bose cubes
Seriously... I too think that it would be a very long time until I'll upgrade to anything more than 7.1, which as you pointed out it only started to become the norm very recently.
I personally see it as a money-grab of sorts; I would be a lot happier with the studios taking more time and investing more money into mixing the tracks properly into 7.1, or even 5.1 for that matter. Just last night I watched a DVD from the Superbit collection (Underworld) and it's 5.1 DTS track is phenomenal. It's a shame the Superbit guys didn't get into BR.

The Superbit guys, Sony, invented Blu-ray.

Hence the regret they're not doing Superbit sound quality any more, everyone thinking that if it says DTS, or 7.1 automatically means better sound :-).

Wasn't Superbit just a higher bit rate audio, much like what they have now on BD, not refering to the HD audio but the standard audio track on BD.

Actually, the Sony "Superbit" process was a little bit of the opposite of what you said in that reviewing the specs that came with the discs(I have three of them)by eliminating most if not all of the extra features they were able to use that space by "theoretically" upgrading the amount of space for the video by encoding at almost double the rate thus, improving the picture to its max capabilities for the DVD technology. The audio was left pretty much intact as before, with both DTS & DD 5.1 soundtracks.