I always stood by the philosophy that a Dungeon Master should be one of, if not the, most experienced and versed players at the table. The sort who could recognize the party as a whole was a problem, as was their limited, narrow scope of understanding, not make it worse by punishing anyone doing it well. Unfortunately he too had that philosophy that only certain things were balanced or good, rather allowed. The punishment for myself was coming to the table with a character that did not matter and that we would spend hours flailing at enemies because they just would not die as quickly as they needed to, then be stuck with some ludicrously complicated puzzle that three-quarters of the time required meta knowledge to complete.

Exploiting character weaknesses is not so much cheating as doing your job correctly; you put the responsibility on the player then to play it out. The issue that arises is if and when players get singled out by the Dungeon Master to always achieve their agenda, see the Chaotic Neutral rogue always somehow having opportunities to break the game with a god of chaos on their side while the rest of us have to fix everything.

On to cursed items, which I admit I have only ever employed once and that was part of the objective they had. A clearly magical artifact, a broken sword, in a world where magic items were rare enough to the point they only ever saw a [i]+1 Magic Longsword[/i] in the rest of the game. Of course they disregarded every sign of danger, that the weapon was locked away underground in a den, guarded by spirits, required a [i]Dispel Magic[/i] casting to break down a barrier, then find it laid out in a large room atop a stone slab over a blood red tapestry, everything covered in dust. The only thing "cursed" about it was that it had a soul of its own bound to it that manipulated the group to free itself.

Yet, somehow, they only somewhat recognized the danger, but went about completing its quest all the same. Until the chaotic sort tried to steal it, throw it into a fire, then beat it with a hammer; said gnome was then jumped by the rest of their party. So no, not too fond of magic items or cursed items, normally because my experience with them is that they were always bad. I am sure you can imagine why based on my previous story.