Hey, Kicksat! I backed the first launch on Kickstarter a few years ago -- it was exciting when they finally launched, and a bit disappointing when it didn't deploy the Sprites.
But it was a super fun opportunity to get involved with with tracking the carrier satellite and decoding telemetry. And with a really inexpensive setup based around a $20 software-defined radio dongle.
As a bit of a followup, I was successful in capturing and decoding a number of its passes over the following weeks. Including what seems to have been the last received signals from it, on 5/13/2014: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/kicksat-gs/U_svX4f2xY8/StfEl... Shortly after that it burned up upon reentering the atmosphere, likely over Africa.
AIUI the Kicksat-2 re-flight is close to launching; the last Kickstarter update said it missed the upcoming (September) OA-5 launch to ISS due to a last-minute issue with a radio license. fingers crossed soon!
Hindsight is 20/20, but when the wontfix decision was made it wasn't clear that there was significant impact beyond the one addon which reported it -- which had already implemented and shipped a simple workaround -- and the missing file had been missing for nearly 2 months on beta. This was just a few days before shipping already-final code to hundreds of millions of people, which isn't a time to be taking changes lightly. (And as a fun hindsight-in-hindsight twist, it now turns out the millions-of-users addons wasn't actually as badly broken as described.)
It all worked out ok in the end, and could have taken a much better path, but it's not as egregious an issue as you make it out to be. A mistake was made, and it got fixed as soon as we realized it was a mistake.
It also includes UI to indicate when DRM content is being played, and there's a UI pref to disable DRM support entirely, if that's your thing.