Thanks everyone for your most helpful responses. As some have mentioned, there is an element of 'sticker shock' here but the way I have been progressively augmenting my VST collection is to acquire them when one of the vendors has a sale. Thus, I acquired the full Kontakt 5 sampler for around 150 dollars and Geist for 100 bucks and so forth. So now I have some recommendations I will see if one or more of the non-iLok vendors decides to have a sale and then see how it goes. Frankly I think a lot of these products are unrealistically priced - I appreciate the time and effort that goes into their creation but a lot of potential purchasers are not necessarily in the music business making money (in my case it's a great relaxing hobby that gets me away from software development, which is what pays my rent).
I don't want to seem disrespectful to Cakewalk by discussing a direct competitor in their forums, but Reaper's pricing and protection model doesn't seem to have hurt it - no copy protection at all, just a nag screen, and a two-tiered pricing model which acknowledges that a lot of their customers don't make much money if any from the music industry. Almost as good is Sonar's protection model where once you have the serial numbers you're good to go, or reinstall, without any further faffing around. I'll mention Musiclabs in that category as well, since again they give you a serial number once you register and you can reinstall any time afterwards. I respect their trust in me and don't exploit it. (actually that was another product where I purchased RealStrat at a reasonable price then they offered a great upgrade deal to include RealGuitar and RealLPC and I couldn't resist. Couldn't afford them at full price. Marvellous products, I love them to bits, probably some of the best VSTs I've ever purchased, to be honest).
I've always assumed that software vendors are well aware that a certain number of purchasers simply won't look at iLok-protected software and factor that in when making their copy-protection decisions. They're convinced that their purchasers are all leading studio composers like John Williams, I guess, where these sort of issues simply don't matter. When in fact there's an awful lot of students or people who enjoy music as something that gets them away from their day job, and they are not making any money out of it. I mean, who is, these days?
It is for this reason I don't own a copy of a couple of high-end piano libraries, much though I would like them, and I absolutely have no intention of ever backtracking on this for any reason whatsoever. You're correct, though, we should collectively let the vendors know how we feel about the various methods of copy protection. If, at least, it was never more onerous that Native Instruments online registration, I'd be perfectly happy. But that's my 'line in the sand'. Anything further and I'm not biting.