I'd counter that the IVAN treatment costs five tokens more than the HRB, requires rolls to be effective, and is still less effective at keeping you alive. Can IVAN survive a nuke at point-blank 100% of the time?
If the fight lasts long enough, the Ivan treatment would result in more power though, cause you keep getting tougher. Unless they alpha-strike you hard enough you die before reaping the benefits.
One other possible reason people don't wanna go robot instantly: going robot is free, and always possible (see Pan's deal with the AM). Returning to human costs money (a good deal, I seem to remember). So if for example suddenly a super genemod comes out giving only full fleshies an advantage, the full humans can go for it, or then still decide to go robot. Full robots have less options open (at least, without having to spend money).
...So what? If you make yourself extremely happy, and end up losing all motivation, why is that a bad thing? You don't need to do anything, because you do things to make yourself happy, and you're already at maximal happiness, so there's no need to do anything. This is really only a circular tautology that you choose to give meaning because it's unusual; There's nothing illogical here, unless you don't value happiness as the only real goal in your philosophy (at which point we can't discuss it because we subscribe to conflicting philosophies).
That said, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. If you succeed, your brain eventually compensates for the increased level of happiness, essentially making you depressed if you go off the happiness, and normal otherwise. And possibly something about degrading your brain if you keep yourself overloaded with happiness neurotransmitters for a long time. This is why a utilitarian philosophy won't break down until we design computers that can feel happiness.
Even if we disregard the second part, there is still the possibility it doesn't pan out. Maybe if one of your life goals is to accomplish something big long-term, but you don't achieve it due to always going for the short-term pleasure, then over time that displeasure/disappointment in yourself might 'overpower' the positive stimulus of the pleasure center activation. That said, this banks on the idea of other sources being able to directly overrule direct pleasure center stimulation, and I don't know enough about brain chemistry to assert this idea's plausibility.
Though, if your mastery of brain processes is even high enough, even if the above is the case, you might be able to disable whatever causes the displeasure. For the individual however, there's a risk: before we know all of the centers that you need to activate or disable to achieve permanent euphoria, you will need test subjects. If the above scenario plays out, these initial test subjects might go into a living hell after the initial euphoria. So for the individual, it's most logical to wait until the technology is perfected (assuming that's even possible). But if everybody did the most logical thing, the technology can't be perfected!
Kids, reproduction, having sex?
Nah, ER
magical medical tech can do that for you even without genitals. Take some cells, revert to stem cell stage, differentiate to germ cell progenitor cells, produce sperm/egg cells.
People actually think the AM is awesome? I felt she was just kind of a Mary Sue that guards the store for no real reason other than being there in case someone actually could do something to threaten the ship in a meaningful way.
Do you have a better way of ensuring that, if people just keep fucking about, or threaten to destroy the game, the gm has a way to stop it?
Why did you buy a kinetic amp for your Avatar?
Battlesuits do, Avatars don't. As far as I know of.