Oh trust me, I understand. I own mechanical watches because there is a definite romantic appeal to them.
However, I have had more than one seiko automatic die from vibration while riding motorcycles. Even high end watches like Rolexes can have -4/+8 seconds per day timekeeping error and be within “normal” tolerances.
Meanwhile, a cheap digital quartz watch will typically be accurate to within a few seconds a month, even before we consider that many of them can sync to atomic clocks. They’re also pretty much indestructible.
The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.
People have no issue paying content creators.
Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.
Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.
If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.