meatSim wrote... "I know of a few talented people who made great stuff only to release it for a reasonable price, find it immediately pirated and get discouraged and withdraw from releasing things into the market."

I'm one of them. That's my reason for being sick and tired, fed up, PO'ed, and pretty much done with the community at large. I still hang around the torrent and pirate sites and occasionally make a fuss and remind them of the stuff they won't be getting from me and how they're cutting off the hand that feeds them. I also invite them to make their own content and offer to guide them in content creation. So far, I've had no takers from the bunch of selfish, greedy, immature and generally uneducated punks that constitute the pirate 'communities'.
At the same time, some content is poorly made (expletive deleted) that doesn't come close to living up to it's promotional shots (a lot of Photoshopping maybe?) and downloading it first allows one to test it before plonking down money.