Hi David,
I am not with Laminar Research: just a flight simmer.
An unfortunate fact of life. The fact of life is that disc 1 has to be used to keep X-Plane running. There is no password key or USB dongle with the disc version as was the case with version 10. It annoys me as well but not as much as it does with you as I have a permanent disc drive in my PC.
Unless there is "change of heart" by Laminar Research they have no intentions of creating a USB dongle.
Cheers
Glenn