Hah, yeah ... I'm making a nuisance of myself wherever possible!
They really are a bit of a shower. However, I'm really hoping some of the efforts to extract the PPPoE info from the boxes themselves or across the wire will bear some fruit. Sadly, it's not as straightforward to extract as the way Sky are doing their auth.
What really gets my goat is that VF's staff won't come out with a plain, unambiguous sentence like "We do not allow routers other than ours to be used on our network". Instead, it's "We do not support third-party routers". The two sentences do not mean the same thing, or carry the same implications.