It's your choice to not purchase. I've had SF on my rig (the d/l version) since Flaming Cliffs was released. So have 9 other people in my squadron. No issues. From what I'm seeing the d/l version has far less problems than the one that does the CD checks.
I have 2 Windows installs, one has a RAID 0 partition with XP Pro, my games and all services turned off (which gained me 120mb of free RAM). The other is my standard install with all my programs such as Photoshop, Vegas, etc. I decided to do a test with SF, cuz people were swearing up and down that SF killed or hampered optical drives. I ran Nero Drivespeed on my drives and benched them. I then installed LOMAC/FC (with Starforce) and benched them again. There was no difference whatsoever in drive performance. Mind you, I was using Nero which the naysayers claim will not work with SF installed. Additionally, I'm running 2 virtual drives with Daemon tools on my gaming install and both the WoV and BF2 ISO's work. I made the ISO's with Alcohol 120 and my legal copies of those games. SF is supposed to hose your system if you have Daemon Tools or Alcohol installed. Most of my squad has these installed and haven't seen one whit of performance problems.
The above wasn't posted to change your mind about SF, it's clear how you feel about both by posts in other forums. I found that in our squad's case this is how things are. Cali from the 169th is a real life buddy of mine and he states his squad reports the same non problems with the d/l version of SF that is used on Flaming Cliffs. Being a member of a dev team that is doing a factory sponsored game using Crytek's CryEngine 2 (Crysis engine) I can respect that ED doesn't want their stuff stolen. When we released a mod for FarCry we had several things stolen from people doing other mods. A quick letter from our attorney fixed that, but it shows that people don't respect intellectual property.
There are no working cracked copies of Flaming Cliffs available on the net. SF stopped that. If you look at F4/AF there was a copy available several days before LP released it. There's alot of theft going on and it's a shame that LP is getting hosed for the monies involved with that. I hung out w/several of the great guys at LP at E3 this year, and it kills me that good peeps like that are being ripped off. It's their descision on what type of CP to use though, as it's their product.
One only need take a look at Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and it's Securom 7 protection to see that some of the alternatives are worse than the SF protection that was originally intended for it. People can't install the game with brand new optical drives. In fact, there are the same complaints with SR7 that there were with SF. All I can tell you is that 5 of the 9 people in my squad have had issues with SR7................