I agree with everything you said. I'll explain myself.

Personally, I don't care either way if other modders use models from other games. I have wanted to post the halo warthog to their site ever since I started modding myself, but their forum rules are "no other game models are accepted."

There was quite a bit of drama over this when other users claimed other modders were using game models and citing "sketchup" as the model source instead of being honest about it. Those that spoke up had their posts hidden because the mod author says "this is my thread and this is offtopic and 'sketchup, bitch.'" I asked them to remove the rule since nobody obeyed it anyway, but the moderators said the rule was serious and meant. They would investigate anything that was reported. So I tried to make them prove it by reporting mods, but they banned me instead. There's modders on that site that have moderator friends and if they don't like what you're saying they sick them on you to silence you, including when stupid stuff like this is brought up. I reported all the honest modders that said where they truly got their models and some of them were removed, one of which was the ST13 Ford Raptor by Castle Tech. They called me out in the thread for reporting them and said to go for the obvious ones first then they'd work on the "sketchup" bullshit. So I went for the next obvious model rip that I knew, which was the Ford Raptor from Forza, which was uploaded multiple times. And here we are.

In the end, it's a matter of who knows who. If you aren't in their group or have your own groupies behind you, then you get silenced or banned for speaking up.