...or rather, since the two happen in parallel, the procedural generation gives HDD time to load most of the assets anyway

I can't remember if it was in this post or another, but they say they found most of the loading time isn't necessarily loading assets, it was the procedural generation. So they say the file duplication effect wasn't creating a major difference, only 'a few seconds' on HDD.

Maybe they should just opt-out of kicking

There is the ESPN / Fox One bundle that does both the ESPN service and FS1, FS2, etc. Not perfect but covers a lot