Can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm here mostly for the DRM-free offline installers. If that aspect of GOG goes away, I won't have much of a reason to stay and keep buying games.

Gwent... and "curation", I guess :P.

I like being a second class customer; it gives me something to strive for.

Who wants to have it all?

"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer."

Interesting perspective. I am like OP (I would also love DRM-free physical PC games back too, for that matter). Now I am considering not complaining about this anymore. As long as I get the update eventually I am relatively content. I would rather wait than EVER have mandatory client use. It is really sad though that it feels we are case aside in the background.

The fact that GOG sucks at automation is likley the reason nothing ever gets done around here, ie bug fixes taking forever, new features taking forever.

GOG devs probably spend half their day just getting the site ready for new releases and new sales. Yet a backend portal with a GUI could handle all of this and literally anyone from GOG could take care of it.

Yep, and GOG isn't the only ones like this. I remember trying to argue for self-managing websites, but then everyone's like "you should use a pre-built CMS," but when i said there would be deprecation issues and things like that, all on deaf ears. Then again, i think GOG is using their own CMS. At this point, i think they're locked into it. The devs are too busy working on CP20whatever and galaxy.
What if the latency slowly creeps to the degree of just not getting updated?

GOG needs to get on board like Itch.io. Their update platform is absolutely the tops.

Of course you loose testing, but we already lost it with galaxy, anyway. There's no cons that we don't already have. And if we don't want to use zip files, why not somthing like GIT? if someone wants to pull an old version just like with galaxy, why can't that be thrown into a zip on the fly as well? It's not like it'd be the majority of the time, since the "current version" should be pre-zipped.

Hear hear. If I would really be so anxious to get my installed game patches ASAP (e.g. because it is an online multiplayer game, or an in-dev game getting critical daily updates), then I would certainly bite the bullet and use a client (like Steam or Galaxy) in order to keep it auto-updated at all times.

For the rest of the games, I'm quite fine if a patch appears later.

Not exactly. On Galaxy, GOG negates testing because of the rollback feature. But they do test (supposedly) for offline installers. But frankly I think it's mainly due to GOG's nack for asserting to much control over everything that happens on the service.

I'm sure there are plenty of different ways to approach this, my main point is that it should be doable and it would eliminate a lot of redundancy allowing offline backup builds (rather it be a traditional installer or a zip file) to be generated with all patches and content rather quickly, and without relying on GOG.

Just because we have gotten something one way for so long, doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking at other possible ways of doing this that is not only better for users, but GOG too.

The only thing i can think of that keeps this from happening is that GOG is starting to get like big business where there's too many chiefs and not enough braves and squalls.

Or as my dad use to say, to many chiefs and not enough indians. Lol

Anyway, I feel like GOG's management just doesn't know how to effectively manage GOG's growth or where to take the company now and into the future.

I was going to say that, but i know they are lurking, waiting for an excuse. Oh, they have ideas. They think it's all on galaxy. The problem is, they don't know how to solve the ball and chain of the offline installers short of cutting off their own leg (getting rid of those of us who don't want gog to be gamersgate). After the foot started yelling in pain, they put down the saw (stopped trying to hide the classic installers). Now they're just going back to simply dragging it along, even though there's skateboards and wheelbarrows all over that one could simply put the ball on.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well to some degree I agree with you. I think GOG would, in honestly, like to rid themselves of standalone installers, from a business standpoint why woudn't they, maintaining installers is more work... they just can't without causing a lot of criticism and drama. But they really don't have to get rid of them, they just need to change how they approach them. Automation is key.

Right: they're too focused on the ball and chain to see the tools to help them move this ball and chain. Like when someone's texting their friend that they can't find their phone.