It's the mentality of "you will own nothing". It is now common place across all industries. It has gotten this way because of 2 reasons.
1) Governments that are suppose to protect consumers, no longer do. They take the bribes lobbing money and pander to the big corporations.
2) People allow all this to happen. I have no idea how the general population has gotten so brain washed. It used to be we all saw them trying and laughed at the attempts. Fast forward decades later and suddenly it seems to have worked. Everyone around me seems to be ok with their freedoms being taken away and crushed under the boot.

Back on topic = I can understand URC doing this for the Total Control (TC) line, makes perfect sense. But doing this to the Complete Control Product (CCP) makes no sense what-so-ever! But it's a dead horse now, they are never going back to CCP being available for the public. Sad and stupid.

To answer your question about old software = Being that the MX-980 is a very old remote, it will be in old versions of the software. So if can find an old copy of the software (and do NOT update it), then you could use it to program the remote. It will not have the latest database of codes in it but you can import new codes in still.