Broadcast is efficient
Dsat is extremely efficient. It covers the entire country and there's significantly more bandwidth available than can be pumped through the _ENTIRE_ UHF TV bands.
As for TV antennas being "svelte" - every time I catch the train into London I roll past thousands on top of 3 story buildings that are on guyed 5-10-metre poles simply to catch a sniff from Crystal Palace (this is less than 4 miles from Waterloo station).
There's nothing whatsoever svelte about those kinds of eyesores (as a former RF engineer I cringe when I see 'em), but they've just disappeared into the the background as far as most people are concerned.
As a 60cm dish is more than enough in the UK (and there are planning exceptions for anything smaller than 1.2m as long as it's not extremely obtrusive, even in AONB), they can normally be positioned to be quite discreet.
The usual run of objections to them end up boiling down to "used by poor/undesirable/foreign people"
The village I work in (in the heart of stockbroker country) is in a valley and has _no_ DTT signal at all. Every house has 1 or more satellite dishes on it, but you'd be hard pressed to see them and there are no gripes about the things. It's funny how people adapt when the choices are "it's this, or nothing at all"
Running a national network of transmitters and translators is extremely expensive and capital-intensive. It's far easier to put an uplink dish at the TV stations and as a result, this _is_ the way things are going.
even 15 years ago the situation was different, but LNAs are now both very cheap and very sensitive, meaning that a small dish is more than adequate - and you can even paint or get them in transparent if you want - http://www.satellitesuperstore.com/fixed-dishes.htm#clear60
For really sensitive sites there are flat panel antennas and these are even harder to notice unless you're looking for them - http://www.satellitesuperstore.com/sky.htm#selfsat
(There are other stores, this was the first one that came up in google)