This turns modding from a pure community driven scene into a shitty wild west app-store where everyone is ripping everyone else off to make a quick buck.
There was NOTHING wrong with the previous system! People could choose to donate to modders! People could create and share resources largely without worrying of exploitation! That's no longer the case.
I recently donated to a drive to fund a laptop for a guy adding controller support to the Mass Effect trilogy on PC. Thanks to that, he's now back to developing it and hopes to release fixes for the third and first games (2 was already done) in the near future. Without these donations it's unlikely this project would have continued.
The system put in place by Valve isn't ideal (certainly the cut taken by developers could do with further consideration) but it has a purpose that reaches beyond lowest demoninator cash-grabs that you allude to. For example, SkyUI wouldn't have seen further development without this and we would be stuck with the existing version. There's nothing to suggest that Skyrim won't be able to continue to load mods freely downloaded from the Nexus or elsewhere.
I agree with this idea and I think it's great; I think it's being handled and implemented poorly, as with each time Valve does new stuff at first
This.