I'm not sure it is ship arriving too late...
Many smaller artists/independent labels today actually make money from nicely made physical media in a way they just can't from online distribution.
Small runs of cds, sold direct with nice artwork are sometimes more practical business than mp3 downloads from iTunes.
Having direct to DDP in Reaper gives these users a kind of power which wasnt possible without additional costs.
However, I personally wouldn't use it without a read-back function, and the creation process needs to be/appear simpler to give me more confidence in it. It feels to me just a bit Joe's Garage to be Frank at the moment. This is one area where you don't want to read the words 'Changelog: Corrected [whatever] bug in DDP export' after you've just sent your small run product to the plant.
http://ddp.andreasruge.de/ as mentioned before has some useful tools, but without full read-back i'd be very nervous.
A fantastic step in the right direction with this though, and many thanks to the developer of this plugin & devs for integrating it. I appreciate the generosity here very much. DDP used to be very closed.