That aside for the moment, what do you think of the FAA's recent temporary drone ban over parts of NYC and NJ? Toothless or useful in some way that doesn't require enforcement or ?

Well, as you might have guessed from my earlier post, I think all of this is just nonsense - irrational people seeing stuff in the sky, guessing that it's something weird, posting on social media, and getting everyone worked up. So anything the FAA does in response to this is useless, because there's no real problem to be addressed here.

Moving past that, this will certainly have some effect. Most people want to follow the law. Most people who operate drones would prefer not to be in trouble with the FAA. And because of the way numbers work, most of the drone flights will be done by people who do drone flights frequently - and frequent drone users are probably doing so for business or professional or serious hobbyist reasons, and really would prefer not to be on FAA's bad side. So yes, a lot of drone flyers will probably follow the temporary ban, even if FAA doesn't devote a ton of resources to it.

Some won't, obviously. Some won't know about it (it's new, irregular, and ad hoc). Some won't care. Some will deliberately go out into those areas, for the frisson of being a "bad boy" or because they now want to stir up trouble.

So it will reduce the number of drones, but won't eliminate them. Whether that's "useful" is an exercise for the reader....