We probably aren't pulling in very different directions at all.
As far as this:
> All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?
I think that all individuals have a responsibility to decide what is and isn't more valuable and align their actions accordingly. The fact that an action causes harm to someone else does not make it necessarily immoral though. I can afford to buy every book I want to read. Nevertheless, I still frequent my local public library. This causes quantifiable harm to authors, yet few would call it immoral.
I could probably come up with a dozen reasons why it's a good thing to frequent the library (libraries are awesome, and making them a ghetto of people too poor to afford to buy books would be to their detriment), but the simple fact is I don't want to spend $8 on a book I'm probably going to only read once when I can get it for free.
This is a selfish action with quantifiable harm that most people do not consider immoral. I can come up with many post-facto justifications for why libraries are good and piracy is bad, but IMO the real reason why society falls this way is one is an old and revered institution, while the other is something teenagers do to get access to media because they are time-rich and money-poor.
And at the end of all of this, I'm still not going to advocate for general piracy, but I will say that it's mostly two sides each inflating or deflating the actual harm done in order to justify a position they hold that was never grounded in any sort of utilitarianism in the first place.