I agree with 3dnooblet that modding has become increasingly more difficulty over the years, 10 years ago when I made my first cars for NFS6, they had at most 16k polies, I remember the first car I made in 3ds Max took me exactly 12 days to make and import into NFS6, it looked quite decent for the time, now while I'm
suffering with the woes of modeling a 60k+ polies Prowler as accurately as I can make, I can't help but wonder "Is this even worth the effort?", and I dunno how to answer this question.
The problem with modern modding is that it takes so long to get a model done that you just lose interest halfway through the process, and I'm saying this as someone who
knows how to model, texture, and do all the ins and outs of modding, now imagine someone who has never modeled, or barely knows what polygons are and wants to make mods, they will be overwhelmed by the insane difficulty of making nice quality mods and will end up doing what most modders do today, which is convert models from other games.
I can't really blame them, it's an easy and fast way to get some reward, much easier than spending months of hard work in a mod that in the case of a beginner may not even end up good enuogh, so why even try? If you look at more popular moddable games, like GTA4 for example, you will notice they are dominated by conversions from other games, Sim communities are probably the last place where there are still some serious thought put into scratch made mods.
And this brings us back to the discussion in this thread, I too think newcomers (and veterans) to the modding scene should feel
motivated to make mods in some way, for now what motivates me is to in the end be able to interact with my creations in a game I like, but for others it might not be enough, which is why the idea of paid mods is starting to surface, this brings many problems that have been discussed already, but I think the direction of the discussion should move from "what's legal or not about paid mods" to "How could we motivate people to make mods?", it's clear scratch made mods are on the verge of dying if new blood doesn't come along, so lets see what we can do to make the modding community grow again?