Personally speaking? Yes.
Unlike most of the sub, my personal issues with the paid mods revolved around the implementation of the idea rather than the core concept of it. The key thing for me was hearing that Valve was confused why everyone was reacting as harshly as they were, when they thought it was ultimately a good thing for the mod community as a whole. I reflected on everything for a bit before realizing that they intended for the paid mods to be sort of like how they initially envisioned Greenlight to be: a system in which passionate modders could create a living off of doing the things they love to do. I support this wholeheartedly.
I saw the major issue lay in the implementation of the program. Obviously it's fairly clear what those issues were, as they've been discussed to death and back. Still, while many were decrying the entire program as a money grab and while others were debating the entire nature of mods and whether they should be commercialized, I saw the issue as more of a service problem that could be allayed or even solved with an alternate revenue distribution model (perhaps not too unlike how the TF2 team handled user-made hats or maps, where the financial incentive was something that needed to be earned instead of dangled immediately in front of everyone immediately). It didn't seem to me like something so inherently evil that they deserved the abject derision and hatred that they saw (and our team had to deal with).
Normally, when people make CSS suggestions, I'll make it if I feel the change needs to be made and if it's quick and simple enough to make that I can deliver quickly. Obviously the header change is a simple enough fix, if all I'm doing is swapping the image assets. However, the header has been on my list of things to critically reexamine for a while now, and is actually next in the queue after the current flair overhaul I'm finalizing, so when the issues initially came up I said "I'll deal with this when I get to the header revamp." Since the sub had made a complete 180 as soon as the drama broke out (and the banner change requests went from zero to a metric shitton as soon as it got posted), I figured it was one hell of a knee-jerk, and I'd see how the sub would react when it calmed down. It wasn't something I particularly thought needed changing.
The drama only escalated since then. Our traffic stats revealed that yesterday broke all previous traffic records by an astronomical margin (we saw a full 50% more unique users access the board yesterday than on the day GTA V launched, which was our previous traffic record). GabeN's Q/A had less than the desired effect when people realized they weren't getting the "no we totally fucked up it's a terrible idea fundamentally as modders should never be financially compensated for their work here's free HL3 as sorry" answer that they demanded. All during this, the volume of users demanding a banner change increased, and with each demand I became more resolved that I wouldn't do something that I didn't support.
When I voiced these thoughts, I said some stuff in a fit of frustration that I really shouldn't have said. When this inevitably got linked during today's megathread, I pissed off a lot of people, which probably didn't help my position. The mutual frustration kept hardening my resolve to not make the change. It wasn't until discussion about this began in earnest in modmail that I realized something would happen regardless, so I left it in their hands. It'll likely happen sooner rather than later, but no specifics.
This entire incident has left me very burned out. As mods, we have to see some of the stuff that people post without any cognizance of social acceptability, and some of the stuff posted just made me feel very angry in general.
Really, right now I'm tired. Very, very tired. It's almost 3 AM on the East Coast... I need to sleep.