I'm glad that they listened to customer feedback and were able to sort this out before too many other paid mods started hitting the marketplace.
That said, I'm actually okay with the idea of paid mods done in this fashion for future games, if it's something that's done that way from day one. While it's true that it may stifle and splinter the modding community, it will let the mod creators create proper licenses for their work going forward. That was one of the biggest headaches here, since the entire community was run without money changing hands, it seems like nobody bothered to license and properly attach terms to their work (as is common in the world of software development) which resulted in a lot of people getting upset because the stuff they worked on was now being sold for profit.
Also I hope that Bethesda (and any future company that attempts this) takes note that most people feel bad about the revenue split that was on offer here. I know that from a business standpoint 25% is quite generous, but it's a difficult pill for us consumers to swallow because most of us feel that the developers deserve more than that for their hard work. Perhaps they could add a sliding scale like Humble Bundle has where users can choose their own revenue split if they'd like. I'm sure Humble's example would hold up well because the majority of people don't ever bother to change it. That way, if you set the default split to low, at least you'll have some relevant data on what people are willing to pay and who they're willing to pay it to.
Finally, I sincerely hope that the people who are getting refunds automatically as part of this process don't get locked out of using the Steam marketplace for a week.
