Until it crashes your box of course...
If a Windows program has a habit of hard freezing the system then the user will learn not to run that program.
As it is, right now _many_ games suffer this problem with corrupted audio and it's very unpleasant (loud bursts of white noise). Makes the games unplayable, in fact.
I'd rather make the games playable and give developers an incentive to find a better privilege model than leave this to coast along for another few years with only a bunch of talk, ideas and non-mainline patches.
Right now there are no good solutions for this we can implement in Wine itself (except maybe making wineserver suid root and drop privs), and SCHED_ISO isn't merged into the mainline kernel, so telling users to upgrade won't solve much.
If we have to require people to upgrade their kernel to get the feature that's fine; at least then when the box dies we can blame the kernel guys ;-)
I agree that it's not good, but this patch makes the best of a bad situation and it's better for the users this way. If they don't want to run as root, they don't have to, and if - like me - they know the game is safe and wish to have some fun this evening then they can.
thanks -mike