Dunno what the big deal is really.... most people these days have at least a 1mbit connection which can bring down 200meg in only 30mins. Compare that to the big halflife patches weighing in at over 80meg in the days when most people were on dialup.... over a 3hour download on ISDN.
What I'm getting at is that in terms of download time / disk space, we (the average consumers) are actually BETTER off than in the old days.
Personally since getting broadband I've never seen a patch that's too big to download. Far Cry weighs in at 1gig including the 64bit stuff and even that was no problem.
For me the real issue comes when developers insist on using their own update systems (e.g. STEAM). That's a really poor way of doing things since it means that downloads can take a lot longer than they would otherwise. In cases where the tried-and-tested method of distributing to multiple 3rd party hosts is used, it's all plain sailing as we can use good mirrors like blueyonder or zen(gamershell) to max out our connections.
Oh, my other pet hate is when cumulative patches aren't released, so to patch a game from retail you need more than one. Far Cry is a good example, for that you needed to use 3 different patches (1.3, 1.31, 1.33 iirc). Should have been one big patch with all the updates as well as the incremental ones.
