Hey Hawkfyr, surprised to hear from you, but glad anyway.
You didn't read my post carefully enough. I wrote, "for the most part"....I didn't say that everyone is, or was, an "unthinking follower".
I wouldn't be posting, or hanging out here, if I felt everyone here was an "unthinking follower", or a "village idiot", or a "free market fanatic"

I disagree with you on the essentialness of stores. There are websites that use a monthly subscription method wherein the models are free, or relatively free if you consider the subscription price as the price for the models. textures, etc.
Those websites haven't caught on as much as websites such as Renderosity, but that is not an argument against them, or proof that they don't work well.

We have been living, since Reagan, in a society that has been conditioned, and brainwashed, to seig heil a kind of Milton Friedman "free market evangelism" that looks on existence itself as a marketplace and everything within existence as commodities, and items for sale, and purchase.
It is just a philosophy, a bad philosophy, that has been hammered into the heads of Amercians, and the rest of the world, for decades now by the priesthood of Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys free market evangelists
The store frenzy here at Renderosity, and the 3DCommen, etc, is a direct result of a bunch of people accepting that philosophy as a way of living in the world. Buy, sell, buy, sell, buy, sell, on into infinity.

These websites, in my opinion, have been ruined by market place greed; almost everyone hopes to make a big profit.
But, in actuality the total number of customers on these websites offers a small market that is quickly saturated with products.
I have talked to some big timers on these websites, whose names I will not expose, whose total yearly sales are chickenfeed; not even monthly welfare money.
No one can live on what they make on sales here.

Another silly thing about the stores and the small number of buyers is that the whole sales thing becomes incestuous. I buy your 15 dollar model, and you return that 15 dollars to me by buying my model. No profit on both sides. Why not just give the models away free.
Yeah, some of that 15 dollars the website keeps, but why not use the subcription method instead.

If the models were given away free you would not have the outlandish number of models being sold, many of which are stinko, and which Renderosity has to offer discounted during it's sales gimmicks because no one is buying those models.
The store philosophy promotes a flood of stinko models, textures, etc., because the item makers are hoping to make money, and come on, let's be honest, lots of money.
If the models, etc, were free, you would not have the "big money profit" motivation lurking in the minds of the item creators, and so less models would be made.

Bottom line is that the way the website is run merely depends of what your philosophy of life is, "is everything reduced to a commodity, is life nothing but buying and selling, becoming a businees, selling yourself......"
or, .....