This "conversation" is a farce. TB doesn't know anything or care about the modding community for Skyrim, Brumbek admits that he doesn't take part in the community (and then proceeds to tell us all about it), and Robin stands to make a potentially decent cut from the paid modding system. Brumbek even has the gall to say that no modders were involved in the protest. I guess Apollodown, T3nd0, Trainwiz, Eiries and Fore are nobody, and that Emma didn't
write a long post explaining why the modding community has always been centered around the free sharing of mods and assets.
Ultimately, the big issue with paid modding goes like this: The publisher of the mod and developer of the original game will
always demand a cut. For paid modding to be profitable for the kind of huge, quality mods some people seem to think this will bring, those cuts must be unreasonably small and/or the price for the consumer unreasonably high. But for selling low-quality mods (like the majority of the Skyrim Debut Pack), damn near any cut will turn a profit for everyone involved, since the modder didn't need much more than a little time. These mods are clearly targeted toward the normies who don't know how modding usually works and think a couple bucks for a mediocre armor set is a fine deal. It wasn't a coincidence that Skyrim was free for the weekend paid modding went live - they figured that only people who've never even picked up the game before would actually pay for mods.
The game developer's cut also presents another issue - it can create an incentive for releasing a game with half-assed, broken, or missing features. Bethesda already knows that modders will jump at the chance to fix their buggy games even for free (see the entire bug-fix section for Skyrim on the Nexus). With paid modding, they now get
more money from mods that fix their mistakes. SkyUI is a patch. It basically makes Skyrim's UI playable on PC, and it went up for sale. And the only reason the old version was left up for free was to mitigate the backlash (it didn't). If anyone thinks game developers wouldn't stoop that low, you're being naive. We're already paying for garbage like eternal early-access games, day-one DLC, on-disk DLC, the same old game every year with superficial changes, etc.
I think this will work eventually. Not in the sense that it will bring more quality mods, but that companies will figure out how to keep the boiling frog from jumping out of the pot and make more money without actually making more content. Gamers are not "entitled", in fact, we've proven we'll usually just bend over and let it happen.