But I know that isn't realistic to expect from a world where its simply EASIER to be a pirate than a legitimate user and the legit user gets treated like an idiot.
You are exactly right. It is becoming faster and easier to use a pirate copy of the game than a genuine copy. Young people today use the internet to download more and more, in their mind there is nothing wrong with it. They do not consider IP as something you buy. As these young pirates grow up and become voters, society will start to change more and more towards piracy. It is happening. Copyprotection is not doing anything.
And using copyprotection is not helping. Take spore for axample. A cracked version of the game was available to download an entire day before the release date and it had no DRM. Not only can pirates install the game more than 3 times, unlike genuine owners, they also got it earlier than them, and for free. As more and more people lose faith in the game industry they will turn to piracy to get their games.
Try as hard as you can but a pirate group will just crack the copyprotection. The group is probably a bunch computer programmers and computer engineers anyway, they know what they are doing. So you have a pirate copy with no copyprotection and genuine copies with copyprotection. Which people are affected? The legitimate owners or people who download for free off the internet?