As said I was eventually going to be paying that much regardless, namely for Advance Wars, Golden Sun, Superstar Saga among others, so instead of saving $5 I now save $0.

I bought Stealth Inc 2 in December so I could earn another premium code. And I really enjoyed the game ...

It was actually exactly 10% in Australia... but it's 10% of price *before* GST. You needed to spend $70 before tax (so $77 with tax) to earn a $7 code.

To demonstrate, Smash was RRP of $79.95, and that means $72.68 before tax. That was then worth (and I'm quoting from the site itself, here, because I bought Smash from the eShop) 519 points. With 500 points being worth $7, that's $7.266 of value - which works out exactly right, when you consider that they round down to the nearest number of points (it would have been 519.1429 points, roughly, and it was rounded down to 519).

As I said, though, they round down. I bought the Hyrule Warriors DLC pack, which would have been worth 126.643 points... I got 126 points for it. And that's how I got screwed over for the extra 1 point at the end - I bought RUSH, Pullblox World, and Art of Balance on the last day, which are, combined, $22.82 before tax ($25.10 after). This would have gotten me the 163 points I still needed to reach exactly 500, if the cost were all spent at once. But I got 16 points, 84 points, and 62 points, which adds up to 162 points, leaving me one short.

Also, physical only works for retail products. Lots of good indie and other small games worth grabbing, even without considering the VC. And the downloads shouldn't have been all THAT long... besides which, they could be done behind the scenes while you did other things, so it's not like you had to sit there with a download screen.

Savings on retail varied, too. I actually got Smash by buying some eShop cards from EB when they had them at 20% off... which was comparable to the discounts on Smash available at retail.