My hypothesis about no-patch is that there is no incentive. You can't report an audio problem like you report a software bug. I can't imagine a situation where

My hypothesis about no-patch is that there is no incentive. You can't report an audio problem like you report a software bug. I can't imagine a situation where the kind of audio problem described by the author is show-stopping. Audio problems are also subject to subjective judgement. What one considers a problem might go completely unnoticed by other people. Heck, the content creator may even argue that it's part of their creative output. In some cases, there is less ambiguity. e.g. you really shouldn't hear any voice when the track says "instrumental", but does any consumer protection law care about that? Like, in Hong Kong, we have "Trade Description" laws that protect consumers against merchandises or services that don't match the advertised descriptions, although I have no idea if those laws would help here. What judge would not roll their eyes and tell you to just settle out of court? But if you settle out of court, I'd bet their laywer would try to add gag terms to the settlement. Are you really gonna allow yourself to be silenced in order to get a 10.99 USD refund? Maybe we could create incentives if 1) audio hosting platforms actually allow listeners to report audio problems in a _systematic_, _publicly visible_ way, like you would file bug issues on GitHub, 2) leaving the problems unfixed will lead to demonetization of the content. Also note that the performance of art seems to become perversed when (big) money becomes the incentive. If you know where to look on the web, there are groups who fansub anime and who will go out of their way to re-encode original bluray releases because they think the audio is out-of-sync, or because they think the picture of the original looks like shit in terms of colour temperature/lightness/saturation/gamma. And they seem to do it out of the passion of sharing the joy of watching anime. While fansubbers have total freedom to decide when to do a patch or re-release, your professional audio engineer working for Warner Bros (again, hypothetical) doesn't have that freedom. If they report a problem about something already released, the first question they get asked by their boss would be "does this hurt our bottomline?" And probably overwhelmingly often, the answer is "no" because we don't have a system that builds the right incentives.