That is exactly what I'm talking about, I can understand why it would be a commercial failure, I'm sure they would try to market the drives 25-50% more than a standard CD burner when all they're doing is bypassing the data encoder. No one would pay the premium, but since all drives are inherantly capable of doing it as long as the drives firmware allows certain CDROM protocols to be bypassed. It's also not very easy to see so the premium is even harder to justify.
Modern burners are able to read and write discs in raw data mode though, I'm wondering if it's possible to acount for the EFM encoding and specifically encode the data being sent to allow the bit patterns to become visable. Anyone know how feasable this is? I'm just not sure how capable the raw encoding method of a burner is, IE is it possible to actually bypass the EFM encoding method, or at least trick it so that you can send a bit pattern to it that will be encoded as a visible bit?