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Does DAB really offer better quality? From what I know, stations opt for puny 64kbps streams which sound nowhere near as good as FM can.

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In theory, yes, it really can, but as you stated, in practice, no. This is basically the equivalent thing on digital TV between the US and Canada: most US broadcasters tried to pack as much channels as possible (that sometimes digital broadcasts are objectively worse than analog ones because of bitrate starvation) while Canada usually only have a 1:1 correspondence between virtual and physical channels (sometimes 2:1 but there isn't really much more than that).

This is not Switzerland, but the BBC apparently uses 192 kbps only at Radio 3 (their classical music station), while other BBC stations are either 128 kbps or 64 kbps only.

Switzerland uses mostly 64kbit DAB+, by the look of the latest observations on https://www.wohnort.org/dab/switzerland.html?PageSpeed=off

Switzerland uses mostly 64-96kbps as per this outdated(?) list https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_DAB-Sender_in_der_Sc...

I saw a video a while back (it was since taken down) from a guy with a low power TV station who experimented with broadcasting much more modern video codecs. He experienced some good results with modern "smart TVs" largely because they have good hardware support for various modern video codecs and seemed to handle the streams just fine. He managed to get multiple 4K video streams over standard ATSC 2.0 signaling working on a range of different TV models. It seemed like a neat experiment.

That's done on purpose so that they can roll out conditional access / DRM. In order to make people pay for that, they need to be invested in hardware first ( DAB radios ) and suffer from poor quality channels.... DAB is optimized to make money, not to serve the general public.

Same thing with ATSC 3.0.

You can read the industry's claims as to why DRM is needed in broadcast (to ensure authenticity mainly), but you'll have to read between the lines that it's to make broadcast TV impossible to record, ads impossible to skip, and (probably eventually) sweet talk regulators into allowing pay-per-view or paid access "premium" channels, probably leeching off the bandwidth (and quality) of the "free-to-air" channels they are legally a required to broadcast to maintain their licenses.

https://cordcuttersnews.com/the-team-behind-nextgen-atsc-3-0...

Source?

https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102300_102399/102367/01...

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