I am pretty sure you were commenting on the 'ethical' aspect but just to emphasize this: regarding the skills involved, cracking today's 'PC games' copy protections is a lot harder than ripping or encoding will ever be. The protections are constantly updated, coming with new ways of triggers and other advanced protection measures in every version, making existing tools and approaches break. It's a neverending war, crackers versus copy protections.

As far as ripping and encoding goes, there is definitely some 'skill' involved as well (especially in video ripping/encoding and ensuring the best or 'right' quality and resolution) but in a lot of cases, it is the same steps and combination of tools each time. If we're talking audio ripping, it is basically a one-click thing. You can't compare this to the amount of skills, time and hard work required for cracking.

And although today's protections are much harder than most of what crackers in the old days had to deal with, it has always been like that.