I haven't read through the entire thread but I'll post up a few quick thoughts then go back through it all...
There have been a few series that I downloaded to binge watch. I always ended up buying the DVD/BR season boxed sets as Christmas gifts for family or friends as a result. That's no justification, but I probably never would have spent the money without having seen it bootleg to begin with.
When I was younger (college days back when Napster was the thing), I was a hard case for some weird principle that if the music was good, people would buy it. I believed that 1 bootleg download could never equal one lost purchase. The kids that I knew at the time would not have bought anything to begin with. That says nothing to the legality of the act; I'm only noting that to negate (somewhat) the argument of lost revenue by the music industry at the time. Sure, there were people who would have bought an album but instead opted for a free bootleg, but I never believed it was a one-to-one relationship.
As to the psychology of it, I do remember looking at it as some type of internet baseball card collection. Again, this is way before torrents existed! Back then it was 56k dial-ups combing through v/mIRC channels and newsgroups. You couldn't just download a 400Mb+ file in 10 minutes and be done. Instead, you would download 160 individual compressed packets @2.5mb each until you had all of the parts to then compile and extract to whatever it was you were trying to get. Most times, these sets were only available for a few days at a time before admins became aware of them and wiped the files. You could go weeks (or longer, if ever) before seeing the same set posted again, or the file naming convention changed by one hyphen because some jackass just had to make sure we all knew
his set was special. A lot of us at the time became more interested in
completing a set rather than ever dealing with whatever the set contained. So there was a strange collectible type of frenzy playing out.
Gotta catch'em all!
That's not my game anymore. Now, I just stream everything from NF/AMZ which oddly enough feels more like cheating than what I was doing as a kid because I never have a physical case to place onto my shelf for the movies I buy now.
There's nothing new here though. Ever since kids could dub their albums onto cassettes, or run a strip of tape over the back of a VHS case, or lay a book spread over the b/w copier at the library, we've found a way to copy something or another.