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I mean, for all intents and purposes, the Renderosity-based hosting idea is based in ease of use for everyone...

I don't doubt their intentions were good... I am equally sure that they do want to maximize their income as well. Note that the latter is not a sin in any sense - they're a business, and it's natural for any business to want to increase income.

Me, I would have gotten community input before anyone wrote so much as a single line of php towards that end. They would likely have gotten a lot of better ideas as to implementation if they did, and at least everyone would know beforehand.

Yep, I'm well aware of how one's own host can choke up. My favorite? In 2005, my (now) ex-wife maxed out the Amex out of spite, and the automated hosting payment (among many other, more vital bill payments) bounced before I knew what happened. OTOH, that was my problem, not RO's. I don't expect them to 'save' me from problems on my end with my own (well, used to be) posted freebies.  Nowadays, shareCG among others does a fairly excellent job of hosting stuff.

Back to the ads and the multiple click-throughs... I mean, c'mon, someone wasn't thinking this one through. It's like the marketing folks wrote the code themselves, and left the web designers and community out in the cold.

If it was new code in the marketplace, I'm very sure everyone at RO would make the distance between product pages and checkout as short as humanly and technically possible. And yet in the Free Stuff section, a (if not the) major consumer draw for the site, they take the opposite tack? Not smart.

BTW, I was only half-joking about the download wait timer for non-payers thingy... I'm almost certain that one was tossed around in the meetings more than once.