Stern Connect is a pretty stupid feature, but that's just my opinion. To each his own. I'm sure others will greatly enjoy it. Personally, I will never use mine! I wish they offered an option to buy a game without it so I didn't have to incur the expense of useless to me hardware.
To the OP's point, if a secondary market is created to sell the apron and hardware and a good looking replacement apron exists, I will sell mine as well.