I'm sorry that you have such inconvenience with it, but hopefully the alternate ways of opening the game without dealing with it will help.
You see, steam saves TWI loads of money, and basically the two have become near joined at the hip. There are those dissuaded by steam, but in this case, its too late to really change. Now, there have been worse multiplayer systems in the past, but granted those who dislike steam are allowed to. In my opinion, Valve really should include an easy-play option for those uninterested, but, until that day, the alternate way will have to do.
I think this is probably quite key to it.
RO being an exclusively mutliplayer game really had nothing much to lose from using Steam
and everything to win.
Steam provides a lot of the netcoding and anti-cheat... saving them the need to hire the expertise.
And for the players.. they get the kind of multiplayer features tht they are looking for.
Join lobbies, friendlists and anti cheat. Patch downloads.
The service fits the target audience quite well, even if it is an unwieldly beast.
However once RO is attempting to tap into the co-op and single player market...
Although Steam still provides those same benefits to the production team and the PvP players... and it's use can be seen as an overall benefit to them...
For SP and Co-op players.. none of those benefits things are wanted. Don't want updates. Don't want friendslists, Don't want anti-cheat.
Don't want online play in any way.
And at this point, for this audience, Steam is seen as a large sum negative.
Adding nothing at all useful but still making the software unwieldy.
So for a PvP only game, Steam may well save TWI lots of money, but if RO2 is planning on being something rather more than RO1, it's the addtional revenues they seek to make from the other new parts of the game that Steam will be costing them some of.
It is my opinion that to capitalise on a wider audience you must make a game that appeals to a wider audeince. If they pander only to their existing audience, then that is all who they will attract.
I'd like to see a software that ticks all the boxes, not just one or the other.