Well have the procedure working and DRM isn't quite as bad as I thought. It's more hoops and ladders than regular PDFs and more than I like but not unbearably so. I'm not using pre-MacOS X or Linux on this compy, both of which can't use these files.
Having said that:
1) some of the non-GDW pricing is too high for me. When I can buy the original printed copy brand new from my FLGS for not much more than a pdf copy there's no choice in my mind. When a product is pdf-only (i.e. never printed) or very oop and hard to find I'm inclined to pay more.
GDW is very reasonably priced there considering, being significantly lower than original / adjusted price for OOP books, some of which are very hard to find. From what I can tell from some rpg.net threads the prices are largely set by the original publisher.
2) The main restriction I'm running into is the copy / paste limit. If QLI's products for example had such a limit I'd not buy most or any of the one's I've bought. I routinely paste UWP's, NPC stats, short writeups etc. into my game notes for comparisons, expansion, and the like. I can't do this as is with the DriveThruRPG.com files. Honestly I doubt such a copy / paste restriction* is going to prevent piracy one bit. Have emailed them about this restriction.
There's a minor concern about not being able to tweak a page or group of pages if the contrast etc. is off for my setup but so far the scans are better than the TSR ESDs so I've not had an unreadable page yet.
On the plus side the files are scanned in fairly well with good use of OCR though the copy restriction limits the usefullness of the file having OCR.
Casey
* corrected this with info from the faq file:
What can I do with my eBooks?
By default, we package our books with rights that allow you to print unlimited copies, copy 10 selections of text (or 10 pages if a selection spans multiple pages) to the clipboard every 10 days.