1 There are very few product 'features' that have pissed me off as much as region codes. I buy a product, I expect it to work for me, not somebody else.

Maybe the fact that my unlocked phone still doesn't permit me root access to the OS. Yeah, that pisses me off about as much as region codes.

2 The fact is, the Japanese companies weren't (and largely still aren't) prepared to offer region-free, cheap versions of their product for foreign consumption, unless something else is done to cripple them and make them undesirable for their domestic audience.

Of course, the easiest way to do that is "don't include the Japanese audio track at all". And that was done a few times. Naturally not my favored solution!

The other alternative, and one that was also tried a few times, was to put hard subtitles in the video. Of course this didn't work for anything that you dubbed, and it was muy unpopular here on top of that...

That said, I authored a whole lot of unencrypted discs back in the day. The Japanese would go nuts if you didn't make the disc R1, but they didn't care if you used DSS on it...

3 A big problem with the same practices today is, they became harder to deal with. Getting an app at Google Play (former Store) is linked to an account. You can create a "Japanese" account, but as soon as you connect a payment instrument to it, the account reverts to the country of the card or PayPal account. VPN is no help dealing with that.