This was amazingly helpful. If I had merit, I would of awarded you some. Will we ever see GPU company's put some form of hardware fail safe that will prevent this, or will the demand of the bottom line and its shareholders continue keeping the price of cards at an all time high?
I'm sure they would absolutely love to get rid of miners. They're not the ones gouging customers, it's the resellers. You can pay retail via Nvidia directly for instance but they disappear instantly.
Because of what GPUs do I assume they'll always be perfect for mining. Even if there's some sort of patch the incentive would be enormous to find a workaround.