It's a cost/benefit analysis... Billions of people in the developing world rely on pirated software, for one...
Heck, even in large parts of Europe, at some point there would be much fewer graphic designers today e.g. if they couldn't pirate Photoshop when they were young and non-pro (and no, Gimp wouldn't be of much use, they want to learn on the industry standard)...
And it shows in their systems. I know a few people with extensive travel experience in Africa and most of them, despite being decidedly non-technical, came back with essentially the same story: "if you absolutely have to bring a laptop, don't ever connect it to something that has a data line"
But for students Adobe was basically giving it away :) I remember getting a CD for 15 guilders at the time at the university. Which was around 5 euros.
To be honest, when I had to upgrade my Windows machine last year, I really regretted the fact that I've gone fully legit with VST plugins. It took me more than a week to deregister and reregister all the horrible proprietary DRM schemes those companies are using. That would have taken less than a day if I had used cracked versions.
Is there something like a "steam for VST"? Maybe it should exist, to ease the DRM pain for legitimate customers.
Nobody really cares if you use the same presets. There were countless top-10 hits with the same handful of DX7, M1, JV-1080, etc presets.
Nowadays, there are so many VSTs and they have so many presets, that nobody can keep track anyway, even if you do use their presets.
And of course you can always program your own patches on most VSTs, alter presets with layers of effects, etc...
Although there are a few larger DRM "alliances", for some reason manufacturers have not yet been able to agree on a common DRM and package management system. Currently every larger company and a number of smaller ones want to push their own plugin management system.
VSTs are a mess anyway, there are only few hosts who are able to scan all of them correctly without crashing (and these do it by separating the process that crashes from the rest of the host).