Hey, Gabe. I'd just like to share a little anecdote and offer up some suggestions as to what could possibly be changed for this to work towards the benefit of the modders, the companies, and the consumers.

I'd like to start off by saying that I've made mods to games in the past. I'm sure a lot of other people have, too. Granted, none of them really took off, and my magnum opus was a poorly-modeled DOOM .wad that was only one room with a cyberdemon in it, but I tried because I wanted to learn and even maybe figure out how to develop games.

I decided I wanted to try and make RPGs. I sat down, practiced drawing, went through countless scripts to try and figure out which ones would work best for which events under which circumstances. I had custom assets. I had stories. I was rearing to make some games, and I never managed to complete them. But I would demo what I had, what I could do, show off that I managed to make a few functional hours of something that wasn't all that bad.

Now I make YouTube videos. My subscriber count is low, my view count is low, and not a lot of people know who I am. But whenever I upload a video, I run out and share it with a subreddit, or other members of a big community like that, saying "look what I did, I'm proud of the work I've done".

Basically where I'm going with this is that I never expected to get paid doing this. I wanted to, yes, but I did -and still do- the things that I do because I want to do them. I made horribly ugly maps because I wanted to get better. I made half-finished RPGs because I wanted people to have fun playing through something I put my hard work into. My YouTube videos are monetized because I'd like to get some money on them, sure, but I know that people have Adblock. I know that people skip them as soon as they can. I do, too. I don't expect people to spend their time or money on something that I did for fun, not cash.

So, beyond that: This entire situation could be pretty easily rectified by the addition of a donation button, or perhaps even just locking the paid option at "Free" minimum, and giving users a REAL "pay-what-you-want" system. It encourages the good modders to keep making good mods, and tells the bad modders that something needs to change before they start getting recognized or even paid for their work.

TL;DR: Do you what you do because you enjoy doing it, not because you think you'll get rich for it.