Good points, but let me clarify:
1. You can, but 99.999% of the people do not. Unless you use a full heat pipe cooling system, your HTPC will be considerably louder than a good quality standalone player. The extra power in an HTPC comes at a price. As for an optical disc drive, I would think that would be smart option to include as you may just want to pop in a disc and not have to rip it before watching. You can definitely do without it to reduce that extra noise though.
2. Even though BD playback is VERY close between players, it is not exactly the same. For instance, the Oppo player normally produces more of a neutral picture compared to a PS3. And sometimes calibrators will adjust the settings on the player for that extra tweak to the picture.
3. I wouldn't say ripping eliminates it, it just reduces it which I agree with you. And if you are NOT playing a CD, you would rely on the ripping software to reduce the jitter.
4. Completely agree. I was thinking more about my player. For critical listening, I'll use the built in analog stage of my player (Pioneer Elite 09FD) as it is better DAC's than my AVR (Pioneer Elite SC-07). When Pure Audio is enabled on the player, it makes a noticeable difference in sound quality.
As for build quality, take a look at reference player and you'll see what I mean. Some can't appreciate it, but I definitely do. From the tray eject mechanism, to the quality components used, to the button feel, and just overall solid build of the unit.
My player scales DVD's VERY well.
I have reference quality DAC's in my player.
Look Jack, you seem like a pretty smart guy, so I'm going to cut to the chase.
1. False. You don't need any of that. I've built 100% fan less systems from scratch without any heat pipes. Or you can just buy one of these for example:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1251-page1.html
2. Even better of a reason to go HTPC instead of player. With an HTPC, you can choose codecs (unlike table top players), and get the best possible quality available. An example is madVR:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228
- high quality chroma upsampling
- high quality scaling (bicubic, mitchell, lanczos, spline etc)
- high quality YCbCr -> RGB conversion
- gamut & gamma correction for display calibration
- full 16bit processing queue
- final 16bit processing result is dithered down to RGB output bitdepth
- bypasses graphics card's video (damage) algorithms
- all work is done via GPU shaders (except madVR's IVTC atm)
- no shortcuts, highest quality has priority over anything else
Your table top player doesn't even come close. Too much processing power is required.
3. Non issue. There are plenty of sources to acquire never optically ripped files. iTunes is one of many. The only place jitter could still occur is before D/A in the USB/Toslink/Coax/HDMI cable, but it never does. Jitter is a thing of the past.
4. DAC quality makes pretty much zero difference. All DAC chips are extremely inexpensive, and as long as the analog output stays as SMD (and doesn't come out as a pre-amped signal, or even worse an amped signal), there is no difference at all. Doing D/A in your player, or in your SC-07 (which is an excellent amplifier by the way) makes no difference at all. However doing D/A in your player is not a good idea unless you live in a shielded bunker. The analog coax cable linking your player to the SC-07 is susceptible to EMI. Sure, you can spend $2000 on a piece of silver cable shielded with nitrogen dioxide (or whatever junk they use today) or you can just send the signal digitally to your SC-07, which keeps the analog signal surface mounted inside the SC-07 and skips one potential degradation step.
It's up to you really. You probably wouldn't even notice any difference.
But schematically, the least the analog signal travels, the better it is.
This is science.