Just saw your post
@HolySchmidt (from another thread!) and thought yeah, that probably applies to me since I'm releasing everything for free (I do have an early access model, but as I often say it's more as a thanks to people who support my work rather than something I'm trying to sell, and a good way to get highly motivated people involved in early versions of plugins) but also, I should forward those thanks to all of the people who released great looks, hair, textures, assets, clothing, plugins...
I'm trying to credit people as much as I can but I also forget sometimes when I do a quick demo of something and it happens that the look I was using at that time was the hard work of several other people. It's very easy to take all of this for granted.
This is a huge problem and a huge strength in the open-source community too. You get critical pieces of software used by thousands of companies, including giants, which was done by a forgotten soul that no one knows about (until they get a security vulnerability). But somehow, both the open-source community AND commercial products somehow strive. Partly because there is interest from commercial entities to invest in open source, and there are enough people who want to make things happen and put in the time for their own interests, or just because they want to get involved and participate.
I don't know how this will translate to VaM in the long term yet, but clearly, it's already a mix of both philosophies. Being a platform on which people can really innovate, it draws in passionate people who collaborate and share knowledge... this wouldn't happen in a pure "store"... so I'm very thankful for it.
Oh, and one thing that is grossly underestimated is the time it takes to actually become _good_ at something, and becoming good at VaM does not necessarily translate to other domains. So when you use great stuff (especially custom clothing, textures, hair and plugins but it's true for all types of assets) remember that someone spent quite a lot of time learning a skill that's pretty much only useful for making VaM stuff, this is sadly not something they can brag about to their friends and neighbors
So yeah, that "like" or "rate" actually means a lot because it gives meaning to our work and makes it feel impactful.