couldn't they ask borland to let their bpls load?
No, because there are restraints against non-default packages in the Explorer version. A work around is to drop the AsphyreReg.pas into DCLUSER, but you can't do this for everything.

but why on the earth are they going to be vcl-less to do so?
Because of the above. A work around would be to not be objectless, just vcl-less. So all the objects and functionality there remains present, just more easily accessed through a few smaller objects.