I didn't realize that not being polished and completely stable makes a game crap. Hello, STALKER, yet another one of the best games I've played in years.
At the same time, hello Call of Duty 4, linear, generic, with awful AI. But it's polished as hell.

No one is saying it's dying but you can look back 5 years and examine how many AAA titles you had to play and compare that to this year. Indie devs have helped pick up some of the slack but there's still a large dearth in the market right now, with some genres almost nonexistent. There has been a definite and unusual shift of PC developers moving to consoles.

do go on pirating as much as you like, but shut the fuck up when developers call you out on it, and leave PCs for the harder-to-pirate, DRMed platforms, consoles.

This is anecdotal evidence. You are trying to say that most people are pirating games not because it's convenient and cost-less but because they have a moral code. Are you inane? It doesn't make piracy any more excusable.

Or you can just read a bunch of them or watch the video reviews or play the demo and make a decision based on that. Like most people do.

The fact that you can do it doesn't make it right. People aren't going to pay for games they pirated on the same kind of a twisted moral code that you use to pardon your own piracy.

If you've played through the game and haven't paid for it, no matter what your opinion of the game is, it's still stealing. Stealing a cheap, crappy car is still stealing, same here.