Hahah, yeah I'm not railing against anything. I just like that the value of potentially trivial DLC as an anti-piracy incentive over a direct source of revenue is being examined. I thought that the anger and vitriole over the horse armor was pretty silly- and I still do. As you said, nobody forced anyone to buy those DLCs. Also, their absence didn't really detract fro the game so it wasn't like you could argue they were important game components withheld to extort extra money from games- as some did try to argue.
It's just funny to think that the good PR and anti-piracy incentive of giving it, and maybe some of the other smaller DLCs from oblivion, away for free to registered game owners might have made more money indirectly than selling it did directly. I see it in a similar vein as when some companies have experimented with DRM free products because they find that increased sales of a low-hassle product outweigh potential piracy concerns. "Itunes +" music and Stardock come to mind.
The SIMS sold so well that even margianally accepted high-margain additional content would make millions. Additionally, something about the psychology of the game or those who played it seemed to make even trivial addon content extremely attractive to many game owners. The game mechanics also made easy to create and inexpensive to distribute add on content a simple matter. Adding a furniture pack or the like was not too much harder than adding a prefab package to AutoCAD. For a game like the Sims it's pretty hard to make a business argument against the direct sales opportunity these realitvely simple content packages present to the company.
For RPGs, even lite RPGs, I think the complexity involved in creating meaningful content add ons and the capriciousness of fans makes the trade offs and the arguments a little more nuanced. Well at least they're more nuanced in theory, the arguments on message boards do, as you pointed out, often devolve into fits of rage about extortion and other exaggerations.