Well,
I thought the idea behide copy protection is to loose a minimal amount of money due to unlicensed usage. That on the other hand should mean, that the company that makes use of copy protection earns good money. Therefore it seems quite strange to me that there are high service costs for getting malfunctioning copy protection working again. a copy protection that makes you pay twice and more often seems only good for the producer of the copy protection - hardly for the customer and in a limited fashion for the content/software producer.
So, what is in for the honest customer - she has to live with the daily hassles of copy protection and in case of malfunctioning copy protection hardware she has to pay a high service fee.
the hardware of the key - well, compared to some other keys, although they got better over the last years, syncrosoft keys still feel quite economic and non-durable.(e.g. Logic key or that formerly used by YellowTools). But I do think that a serious solution to this problem comes with hardware - we are living in 2012 - we have clouds, databases, mobile devices, CRM, networks, remote sessions, tracking technologies, GPS, etc. iLok has a more reasonable license management since years or decades. A company like VSL, that makes great and innovative software products like VI Pro, VE Pro and MIR - uses copy protection technology that requires you do send a key with traditional mail - seems strange.
And they are not alone - Steinberg (a company owned by Yamaha!), eager to be innovative, does the same thing. Maybe the new copy protection scheme by Plugin Alliance is something useful and will replace those dated copy protection technologies from the last millenium.
best