Why did Dell refuse to supply me with a proper Win 7 installation disk when I purchased my Inspiron?

Many years ago, when I purchased my Dell XP machine, Dell supplied me with a proper XP installation disk. When I purchased my Dell Inspiron in 2010 Dell refused to supply me with a proper WIn 7 installation disk even though I offered to pay a little extra for it. It was the recovery partition or nothing. As recommended, I did make a repair disk at the time. I assume it can't be used to make a repair reinstall but if it can I'd be grateful for any details.

Would my cynical view that this was all to do with Dell making an extra profit and nothing to do with them being helpful to their customers be correct?

Six years later this could well be becoming a serious problem to me. I'm having one or two incipient problems and it could well end up in having to do some sort of reinstallation of Win 7. As far as I can see I have a number choices.

1) Use the recovery partition, that is a factory reset. I now have 6 years worth of downloaded software plus numerous tweaks, some of which took me ages to find - try to get any audio-related program to work "out of the box" and see what happens. I would only do this in extremis.

2) Do a repair reinstall, the favourite option of many threads on Windows problems. Er, excuse me, Dell have made it impossible to do a repair reinstall.

3) Contact the MS site that supplies ISO images of Win 7. Oh dear! As an OEM, Dell would appear to be on the banned list. Microsoft refuse point blank to supply anything.

4) Ah, there's a site that will supply a legitimate copy of WIn 7 (Heidec Disk Image) that you can use with your MS Licence. Sorry, squire, Microsoft pulled the plug on this one in February 2015.

5) Buy a cheap copy of Win 7 on Amazon. You just need to look at some of the photos of the disks for the word 'dodgy' to pop into your mind.

6) Just upgrade to Win 10 I hear you say; this will carry over all your existing programs. As well as being dubious about this claim one of my current problems is some Windows updates not install and a couple of these are for installing certain prerequisites before you can install Win 10.

So, well done Dell, it's nice to see such a display of customer support.