I don't feel it's a hack. DAS is a mechanism of the game that was intended to aid players and make the game play more enjoyable for the typical player.
If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players?
As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame?
Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.
If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players?
As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame?
Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.