The thing that bothers me the most is that Sonys decisions often reflect what's good for them and not what's good for their customers. All piracy aside, custom firmware made the original PSP a much better device for the user in general. You probably haven't followed this so here are some examples. The biggest advantage was you could put all your games on the memorystick instead of using the little CD-ROM drive, which meant a) loading times where much faster, because you're reading of flash b) battery life was better, since no spinning optical drive is running and c) you didn't have to carry anything besides the device!

Another funny thing, the PSP shipped with a Sony-made Playstation 1 emulator on it, which meant you theoretically could play the whole PS1 library on this thing. Now instead of letting people use it, it just sat there inaccesible. People where actually quite surprised to find it there after the PSP was hacked, and finally allowed everyone to use it.

Then there where cool little tweaks & tools - there was a really cool savegame system, which allowed you to save at any time during a game by taking memory snapshots, which is very useful on a portable system. And another cool tool let you transfer files from your PC wirelessly over your WiFi.

Well the point is, it really unleashed the device and made it much more capable then in its locked down state, in effect providing greater value for the customer. You'd think that after a while Sony would get some insight and reconsider their decisions, instead they lock down even more and start suing people!! What the hell, I think a lot of companies, who blame their problems on piracy and whatnot are slowly scaring of their customers away without even noticing, which then of course gets blamed on piracy again...