You hit the nail on the head with this! The content owners are to blame 100% . Disney wants to charge xxx amount per subscriber and if it is too much on Dish then they'll increase the package costs, receiver costs. If the content owners weren't so greedy then there wouldn't be all these increases. Playing the leaping game from Dish to Direct and vise versa seems to be the only way to get their attention. The true way to grab their attention would be if a great majority of subscribers cancelled their service which that won't ever happen.
Almost everything goes up in price. I too think pay TV is going up too fast, and may have to cut back. But to not expect it to increase is foolish.
And money is fungible. There is no direct link requiring equipment fees to only be applied to equipment by Dish. They make a business decision regarding what prices go where.