Why are they so desperate to be liked by users? Their whole mission is anti-user. Their job is to scrutinize paying users and take away the softest they bought when something isn’t right. Of course they are not liked, they are the bouncer at the disco sending people away based on their feeling.
Having the runtime of the codec installed in a wine prefix is not the same as having it work. Just like wine has to work on the codec to get the data to it and output back to the game, in a way that the game, the codec and wines d3d implementation can deal with it. This is made mode difficult by some codecs doing output themselves and some handing buffers back to the game for display.
This is hard and gruesome work. With painstaking observing and duplicating behavior, since a lot is not documented and for a clean room implementation the person implementing it can not look at disassembled binaries or (hypothetical) code-leaks.
That is just wrong. “Cracking” is the circumvention of Copy-Protection. Before Denuvo afaik no Copy-Protection had data-integrty checks, so modification of game Behavior (aka Modding) did not require tampering with the Copy Protection. Best Example SKSE for Skyrim, a tool adding a lot of additional functions to the internal scripting language while still keeping copy protection in tact.