My suspicion is that they wrote the "secure" DRM first -- probably actually encrypting the video files -- and realized that it was way too slow to decrypt before playing the file, and for whatever reason couldn't figure out streaming it to the player during decryption.

So they hacked together something that was acceptably fast, figuring they'd solve this technical difficulty for the next release, and that was that....

It's also unfortunately possible that (until now, at least) only the developer(s) knew about this shortcut, if their internal dynamic is sufficiently poor.