This is gonna get long, but I'd rather answer you in full because there's not enough of that going on here. Too many insults slung around at dissenting opinions.
So. Damage? Do you think modding is so fragile that there can't be multiple iterations of it? In a sea of thousands, "dozens" is a negligible number. The "dozens" were people who were salty they hadn't produced content in time to jump on the bandwagon, or they were the "dozens" who only read headlines and thought they had the insight to comment--despite not actually being involved in the mod CREATION community in the first place.
The "Valve/Bethesda gets 70%" logic was thrown around so much it was sickening. It's the same scare tactic that politicians use in their ads, and from the start it's off-putting.
Here's the real break down: Valve gets 30%, Bethesda gets 45%. But why should Bethesda or Valve get a cut for what is essentially not their work? Here's why: Valve distributes the content at cost to them across their servers. They host it, and they distribute it. Plain and simple. Could it be less? Sure, but knowing Valve this was the lowest they could possibly take to cover the expenses. And who knows? If the feature hadn't been aborted so soon after it was launched, Valve might have even reduced their share. As for Bethesda, it's THEIR GAME. It's THEIR ENGINE. Have people lost their minds? Of course Bethesda is going to get a 15% bigger cut than Valve. Their motivation is much more greedy than covering distribution costs. But then again--they're a company. They kinda have to be greedy to survive. But it still left a marginal slice of money for a successful modder to profit from.
Another big point of contestion was the money threshold that a mod has to make monthly for the modder to see a check.
Why the threshold? Well, financial institutions and banks charge for money transfers in fees. The individual might not have much experience with this, but especially when it comes to these types of transfers, banks like to tack on everything they can. The smaller and more frequent the amount, the more fees the bank wants to levy on the amount. This is why Twitch.tv streamers generally don't accept donations below $1.00. It simply costs more money to xfer that money to the intended account than the $ value itself. So generally this means you must be successful monthly. Anything below that threshold isn't seen because honestly it wouldn't even be worth sending to the modder by the time the bank is done with it.
Here's how the workshop pays out right now:) --specifically for Dota2/TF2. The workshop artist gets 25% of the sales on the item, with different amounts based on how the item is unlocked (ie: keys, etc). This is the primary reason I'm so ok with the way the Skyrim modding was broke down. Dota2 modders are quite successful--the more successful ones are even able to do it full-time. The 25% profit doesn't seem to weigh them down, so logically why is it any different for the Skyrim mods?