Here’s the problem: they trust the client. The client is in the hands of malicious actors. Anti-cheat - even ring-0 anti-cheat - does not make the client trustable. The client is still in malicious hands, and that trust will continue to be abused.

Their “simplest possible solution” has not solved the problem.

More than this, it sounds like a serious net negative to me.

Legit users who had modded their clients to have some perfectly fine features (such as performance enhancements) are SOL - they aren't gonna risk it just for features they've lost, they either gonna live with whatever's left or just abandon it entirely.

And those with malicious intent are gonna just work around the anticheat (because why not - what they're doing is most likely was some bannable offense already) and continue. Yes, there's some barrier but just the other day we had a thread where DMA hacks were mentioned (and PCIe cards for that are pretty cheap) - does EAC has anything against those tools?

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good

We don’t put locks on our doors because they’re unbreakable but because they are the right compromise between cost and benefit

If the true goal is to enable creators, why not let the creators choose whether to require EAC to connect.

It should not require much extra developer time at all to let both users and creators choose whether to join an EAC or non-EAC instance.

Excellent idea, and in theory others could create better alternatives for centralized moderation.

That's what I was going to say. The bullet points sound like a ton of work. And I'm sure the devs put considerable effort into exploring these points. There may have even been code in the repo to address these points.

EAC is about protecting game files. This is to protect cosmetic sales, nothing else.

You can already import any models you want (read: models you purchase from eg. gumroad) by uploading them through their unity sdk.