@TheEmu@elfine - no it is not called data mining. Data mining is a different activity altogether and is applied to the process of getting nuggets of information from huge data repositories.
This is true by definition and in an industrial environement. What exactly people call data mining most a the case is the fact to get informations on some sort of data file and it's maintly used for games to make wiki and other 3rd party programs for those games. Sometimes games's compagnies give some little info sometimes they don't at all. So like I said it's tolerated. Decompiling or reverse enginering apply only to executable code. There is NO NEED to decompile a file based of text or pure binary data.
You can take the definition of data mining exactly in the same way to you use the word Haker, people commonly use that word to design a personne who generally do something illegal, it is to totally false. The real definition of the term Haker is someone who is a true expert in his domain, this can be informatic or anything else. The firsts personne called Haker was a MIT studient.
I could go further since you are talking about Microsoft, historically Windows was a bad copy from the Apple Os and Atari Gemdos (but Atari had the rights from Apple to make their own Os similar for the Atari ST). The first DOS version from Microsoft made with IBM was litterally copied from the Amiga DOS. Do you think they didn't used any decompiling method ? In same way Microsoft and many others used free opensource code to make their own formats, this could be considered as a *****.
The only fact is I can't manage my collection without using my own program because of a lack of function in the iStripper app, to do so I need to use some of the iStripper files and to know how to deal with them.
I'm not sharing or selling anything.
I do not blame Totem either because their application can not meet my expectations, but if I can help them improve it, I'll do it.
Sorry, it's a bit of a subject, but I wanted to explain it with these comparisons. Anyway I'm going to stop to argue on it... it's sterile, we'll never see things the same way.