It is a spiral. If there is support, people feel confident and buy stuff and make pictures. If there are pictures, other people buy stuff so they can make pictures, too. If people are buying stuff, the merchants make more of that type... so there is more support. The spiral can be entered at any point, but it is risky. People avoid risk. Even if they claim to be original, for the most part people want to dress like everyone else and use the same models as everyone else. The merchants want to be assured that the time to make something is going to be rewarded with suitable sales. A customer buying a figure wants to know that he will be able to house and clothe and texture it... and that he won't be sneered at for using that figure. (Dork wasn't a term of appreciation the last time I looked.) Before the community got so market-oriented and there were stores on all the sites, I suspect that there was a lot more support of varied characters by all the free-stuff makers, because they were making what they wanted to make and hoping that others would find it useful, too. Once everything became so Victoria-centric, the time to make other stuff diminished. And once a merchant starts to put a price on his time, comparative sales will dictate production. We get this in other fields, too. 85% of the games in production are usually twitch games because the best selling handful are twitch games. Most of the games in production never reach market. Getting something published which doesn't fall into a tidy niche is extremely difficult and getting harder by the year. If it doesn't fall into the popular niches, forget it. So we get gluts of twitch games and sports games... but a dearth of role-playing, puzzle, or evergreen games. Kids will buy the latest baseball game even if it is no better than the other 5 baseball games they already own... simply because it is the newest iteration and all their friends have it. Well, are we no different with the latest texture or hair or pair of high heels? Meanwhile, the other figures are shivering in the cold. Hmmm... blue skin textures with goosebump maps anybody? Carolly