Bear in mind that, if you strip away the legal context and look purely at what DRM actually does, what you see is a hacking tool.

That may be true in some cases, but not all. Consider the pre-Internet DRM for games: intentionally ill-formed floppy disks, and later intentionally ill-formed CDs, where the presence of the ill-formed data acted as a flag that this was a copy from the manufacturer, rather than a duplicate made by the end user. Copying tools tended either to fail to copy (because they expected a well-formed input) or to produce cleaned copies, both of which then tripped the game into reporting that it was not being run with original media. Many games had DRM like this, but the extent of failing the DRM check was that the game would not play.

This is obnoxious, qualifies as DRM in the context of the law, and may qualify as a defective product in some jurisdictions, but I cannot see how that would qualify as a hacking tool. I will grant that some of the newer more invasive DRM techniques are so nasty that they either are hacking tools or leave the system dangerously exposed to them, but it is overstating to say that all DRM are also hacking tools.

Now that “everyone has an always-on Internet connection” (a product manager meme that I despise), games have switched to using the affirmative response of an Internet-accessible license server instead of checking for a manufacturer-issued CD. Again, this effectively impedes access to the work, both for illegitimate users and for any customers unfortunate enough to incorrectly fail the check (including customers whose only failure is wanting to use the work after the vendor decommissioned the license server). However, as with the CD-as-a-dongle approach, that alone is not enough to be useful as a hacking tool.

With regard to solving it in the market: if not for the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules, there would be a ready market for DRM-stripping products and services. This is not theory. We saw this with CD ripping and CD emulation software in the mid-to-late 1990s, when customers resorted to ever more elaborate ways of convincing the DRM-encumbered games that launching was permitted. Among other legitimate uses, this was popular with people who regularly played more DRM-encumbered games than they had CD drives available, so it was not possible to keep all the game CDs in the system concurrently. Copying the CD to the hard drive, then mounting a virtual image of it would, if the emulation was good enough, satisfy the DRM’s CD check without requiring the CD to be loaded. Yes, this could be abused by gifting/selling the CD after ripping, but it was also used to avoid the wear and tear of constantly shifting CDs in and out of the system. I think I once played with someone who claimed to have used the rip+emulate approach because his CD drive was noisy when spinning (so he wanted it to spin down whenever practical) and tended to spin down when unused, causing the game to stall at awkward points when it accessed the CD again, requiring a multiple second spin-up phase. Accessing the virtual CD on the hard drive was always fast and did not add to noise. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules prohibit bypassing DRM even for non-infringing uses, so CD emulation for the purpose of bypassing a DRM check is now illegal, as is marketing software to assist in that purpose.

Remove the anti-circumvention rules and the market would return to solving problems like that. As long as those rules stand, we need pro-customer rules to protect against DRM.