Buying a game despite unacceptable DRM says "This DRM is okay. We as consumers will accept this."

Also, see below.

Here's the (obvious) point that you missed: As indicated by the quoted sales information, fans did exactly what you suggest above; they bought the game rather than pirating it, producing fantastic sales for Bethesda.

Yet Bethesda still moved to online-DRM. As Paingiver mentions (and you concede), DRM has little to no effect on pirates. Thus the intuitive leap is that such DRM must have another aim, namely preventing secondhand sales.

Perhaps Bethesda hasn't outright stated such, but I wouldn't expect such a statement given the negative publicity similar statements have caused.

Yes, there is some supposition involved, but no more than in your stories attributing developers going out of business to piracy. Read any of the dozens of threads about these issues on these forums if you still don't get it; I'm not interested in repeating those debates yet again at the present time (better things to do).

Transparency is quite useful in both government and business. Information is key to any meaningful debate: Perhaps debating the social and economic dimensions of copyright, piracy, etc wouldn't involve so many suppositions if we had hard data to examine. Transparency is also good for investors.

Now, I'm all for limited government, so I'm open to being convinced that transparency is somehow a bad thing (tho it's somewhat off-topic here; you can PM if you like).

So we're criminals until we prove our innocence? Fantastic. What's it going to take to win that trust back? Selling over 3 million copies of Oblivion within a year's time wasn't enough for Bethesda. No matter how many sales are made, there will be a cry of "MOAR!" and a push for stronger DRM. This despite the obvious failure of DRM to prevent piracy and the fallacy of equating each pirated copy with a lost sale (see other threads; again, not interested in repeating every detail of this same debate over again).

Yes, that's correct. However, nobody's forcing you to actually buy. Nobody claimed that you need Skyrim. It's not anymore (if it ever was) that you don't have alternatives, where you can spend your money instead.
If you still want this particular title and see Steam as unacceptable, you could get it for a console without Steam (if the DRM used there is better, is another story).

First, I never suggested to buy the game despite you dislike / don't want the DRM involved.

Since supposition is the obvious way to go here, I'd claim that it's at least as much likely that Bethesda took that road because they didn't saw a better way, as your assumption of secondhand sales. Who's right we're likely to never find out.

Quick one: did the use of speed traps eliminated or significantly lowered the amount of racers on the streets? No? Yet they're still in use, despite their ineffectiveness. Why? Because there's no better way so far - and no, penalty = effectiveness doesn't work. We probably all know how much easier it is to get away with pirating software then with speeding.
However, I have yet to hear about a case where speed limits where taken off, because of people speeding even more in protest. It's just illusory that people drive more reasonable, the less speed limits are on the road.

Hold your horses. I never claimed anything about transparency not being good. I'm a fan of it.
But demanding transparency because you don't like DRM and for the ease of your gaming mind, when we have lack of transparency in governments / companies in general, which is resulting in people actually dying, yes that's mindboggling... epic.... ridiculousness.

Sadly, yes. Can't say I like or approve it, but as it stands right now: yes. Especially after the amount of pirated The Witcher 2 games, despite the option to get it DRM-free - yes, we failed to prove it.

So, if one pirates the game after legitimately acquiring it thrice, where does that leave him? I'm not needling you, just curious that by calling pirates "scumbags", which camp these people would stand in, in your opinion.

I'm not sure I fully understand your question but if you are asking me what I think about someone who pirates a game they already bought at full price then I personally don't have a problem with that. That person has already given his money and support to the industry. It's still illegal though. The ones I called scumbags are those gamers that play many many games and yet have never purchased a single one.

Am I too late in saying that DRM is not aimed at full blown pirates put there?
DRM intends to slow down the piracy around release time, to give a helping hand to the initial sales. And most importantly stop you from trading games.
Trading games is also the reason for online codes being sold for second hand titles. Companies want in on the second hand sales, that's it.