I agree, though I wouldn't say it the way you did. About all I watch on TV these days is the news, a few classic shows on TV Land, and once in a while Law and Order on NBC, unless there is an interesting travelogue or nature show on the National Geographic Channel (or Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet), for example. The rest of the time I watch classic TV and movies on DVD; I must say I've never enjoyed watching TV more. The only movie I didn't care for was the very first DVD I rented from Netflix.com, shortly after getting a DVD player for Christmas almost two years ago. The movie was the original, uncut version of Serpico, starring Al Pacino. I never saw such garbage in my life. Never again. The series I rent from Netflix these days are classic shows from the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up. TV was a lot better, IMHO, in those days and earlier than it is now. Back then there was a little thing called the National Association of Broadcasters Television Code. Most U.S. television stations subscribed to it, making for much better programming than the garbage seen today. Prime time programming 30-40 years ago was, for the most part, entirely suitable for family viewing; the few shows that tested the limit were broadcast at hours during which most young children would be asleep. The stations went off the air around 2 a.m. as well, so we had no such things as infomercials and such to worry about. That's another thing that gets me. Why on earth do TV stations bother to run those infomercials anyway? I'm sure not many people watch them between two and five a. m., and I am sure no one tapes them on a VCR to watch the next day. Most infomercials are about as interesting to most people as a test pattern. The nation's TV stations are, IMO, wasting money and energy (AC and RF) running these darned things, not to mention having to pay a transmitter engineer time and a half or more (!) to work those overnight hours. They would be better off, again IMHO, going back to the way it used to be: signing off after the last network program left the air.
I honestly don't know if stations make money on infomercials or not; if not, as I said above, running these things in the small hours of the morning, when most folks are asleep anyhow, makes no sense to me. Many people, myself included, reach for the remote and mute the sound on the commercials anyhow, but the television industry is trying to stem this trend by various techniques. (There is a technique being studied, and perhaps close to being implemented, which would make it difficult or impossible to skip commercials on TV shows recorded on a TiVo unit.)
I think the next step might be subliminal advertising, so even if one mutes the sound, the commercial's message will nonetheless get through. The only way subliminal ads wouldn't work would be if the person wasn't watching the picture, but, knowing that commercials keep the stations and programs on the air, the networks and local stations may eventually come up with a system to make it virtually impossible to ignore commercials even if the viewer was away from the set; sort of like the Emergency Alert System, which force-tunes your TV to the key EAS channel in your area if there is an alert or even a test (at least that's how it works if, as I do, you use a digital cable box ahead of your set). Even if you try to change channels, the same emergency message shows up everywhere, making it impossible to ignore the thing unless you turn the TV off.
Sigh! . . . you just can't win.
BTW: As to secret TV service menus, my RCA CTC185, and possibly my 1995-vintage Zenith Sentry 2, have them, but I've only seen the ones on the RCA once, when a technician from the local TV shop was here to repair the set four or five years ago. I don't remember for the life of me how the tech invoked them on the RCA, and I never knew how to call them up on the Zenith, but maybe it's just as well. As one of you said, it is possible to cause severe damage to a TV set if you fiddle with those controls without knowing what you are doing. Most give no clue as to what they do anyhow (a service manual is required to find that out, as the menus appear simply as numbers on the TV screen), so fiddling with them can only get you into trouble if you don't have that info in front of you. That was probably one of the best things TV manufacturers ever did, as it took the service controls off the back of the set and put them somewhere where most average TV viewers would never think of looking; this alone probably reduced the number of nuisance service calls drastically. The procedure used to invoke the service menus is sufficiently complicated, moreover (and never mentioned, of course, in the TV's customer instructions), to make it nearly impossible for unqualified persons to access the menus even if they know they are there.