I get what you're saying. I always have that problem on the developers site. People are registered with their email addresses there, which often are quite different from their Renderosity nicknames.

As a compromise, you could go with OpenID, but allow people to register aliases. So they could log in - for example - as joejaguar.bestsocialnetworkever.com, but appear as lesbentley. That way you'd still not have to deal with passwords and such.

That said, I'm not saying having your own site registration for uploaders would be a bad idea. Just that it's a big chunk of functionality. But if you can find good authentication software that's easy to use, maybe it's not so bad.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.