Is cheating a major problem on the consoles? Most of the companies usually have an offline mode and an online mode that are separated. As far as I know, they aren't having major problems with cheating. Nintendo does it the same way, again, I'm not hearing a lot about hackers having a field day with the Nintendo servers and seem to be relatively secure. Cheating on PC is another matter, which the online requirement is not going to stop because the person still has access to the files. At least I keep on hearing.
The examples you brought up are free2play games. I'm talking about fully priced retail games When you play a free2play game the expectations are different.
The rest of the points I brought up you either made excuses for or sidestepped completely. The Bungie example, yes they were stopped, but it doesn't change intent and a general trend I have been seeing in the video game industry among major publishers.
You come at it from the point of trust, I come at it from the point of cynicism. I have simply seen too much BS to have any trust. If I believed that deceiving or lying to the consumer was not cooked into the business model perhaps I would be more like you, but that is not the case.
