As far as the root zones go, those userid/password combos were only supposed to be given out to iTLD and root server operators. It didn't exactly go that way.. I have one myself.. but I think NSI really is doing the "right thing" by not giving out zones. The only reason I can think of, that one would need an entire zone, would be for mailspamming. Other "useful" things would be webcrawlers getting new zones (altho I dont think it's a good idea to webcrawl without someone submitting), and to have statistics data. None of which, just like this post, is critical or important to the operation of the Internet. :-)
I'd be happy for some degree of access control - I just don't like the fact that another UK company here can "legitimately" get access to the zone file information as a gTLD core and uses it for exactly the same reason we want it - whereas we're not "supposed" to. We want to use it to create an in house db of domains so we can track which domains are being released and do some stats stuff on it as well as do some degree of local domain querying without having to rely on internic's ropey whois) ... no desire to farm email addresses or anything. Manar