All of your reasons seem so fake. I bought a PC last summer that I've been struggling to make work so that I can join in PC fun. One of the primary motivations was the vibrant modding community in so many games, not just Skyrim. The existence of a vibrant modding community makes your past posts complete nonsense:
The goal is to increase the total investment the community makes in extending its games. We thought we were missing some plumbing that was hampering that.
And
Sky rim is a great example of a game that has benefitted enormously from the MODs. The option for paid MODs is supposed to increase the investment in quality modding, not hurt it.
Skyrim had a huge modding community with DLC sized mods that were distributed and supported for free by the community. Mods will continue even if the content creators are not paid. I agree that really good content creators should be paid, but that really ought to be between the modder and the community (preferably on a donation basis). Also, you know full well mods will always be made even if they are made for free. You know it because you've already benefited from the free modding communities. Like you admitted, Valve itself came out of the free modding community.
Here is what is really happening. Valve sees a flourishing free community with free distribution occurring using Steam's support. Valve or Bethesda, whoever had the idea, realizes that money can be made of this vibrant community. So Valve and Bethesda (and Bethesda could quickly become Rockstar, EA, Ubisoft...) decide to tax this community. This isn't about supporting the mod community, this is about another revenue stream. Based on this deal with Bethesda, a single modder has to sell at least $400.00 worth of his mod before he ever sees a dime. Forgive me if I'm unimpressed with your gift to the community.
Which brings us to now. You are the most popular head of a gaming company in existence. No one eve comes close. /r/pcmasterrace worships you as the holy herald of the PC Master Race. So you are here using that to calm the waters, make some tweaks, and get off scot-free. This is all just marketing. You've made it very clear that you will not be removing the paid mods based on your refusal to answer the donations question and your weird misdirects about the sliding scale (we can read; we know you explicitly didn't say that $0.00 was an option).
As a gamer I don't really know what to do. But, I can tell you that I don't believe a word you type. This is about increased revenue not community support. You are hear as a PR stunt and not because you care. I will not say that I am never going to buy from Steam again (the sales are way too sweet). But, I will be far more hesitant to buy from Steam in the future and will be supporting your competitors far more.
So if you even read this far I will at least ask two questions:
Is removing "buyable mods" even in consideration?
When will Steam invest in tech support, because even EA is crushing it in that regard.