My two cents on this whole mods debacle:
-it's simply wrong asking money for mods. I agree developers of mods should be able to take a compensation from their works, but mods are fan-guided projects. You do a mod because you like that game, you want improve it, extend its life, bring your own contribution to that title. So the donor link is here just because of this. There are great mods around (recently I played Alchemilla, I gave up because I had not so much time to spend on it, but it's a very good mod, with acting, cutscenes, good sount-track, nice design, much better than a lot of retail horror games on Steam, in example), so it's right if someone want do give money to a creator, he's free to do that. But introducing a price factor in mods scene is simply wrong, it's just a cheap way from Valve and Bethesda to monetize on something that requires them literally ZERO resources spending, if not the space to host those mods on their server. I'm pretty sure this is just a test so Bethesda can introduce this new feature in Fallout 4 or whatever game they want to launch soon, maybe stopping at all to do DLCs, demanding this to community. A thing that already happened for years, for free, but...they didn't see a cent from that, so they are charging for money now.
-Valve would be done without Gabe Newell. I don't believe the "we launched this but we didn't know all of this would happen". When you introduce something like this, you think about all implications this can have on community and how it will be accepted. No way introducing money for mods would leave the community happy. We just saw a lot of scams and whatever, and Valve of course thought about this. It would be extremely stupid not think about this while you run a business, maybe the big business for this industry as Steam is. So they "try it": if the community would be happy with it, ok, Valve is great, it introduced a brand, new, amazing feature. If not, as it happened, they would say "Ehi, it's not our fault, we didn't think this can cause problems". And Gabe in all of this is trying to do damage control in a cheap way, without really answering questions asked. And with him out of the games for a couple of days, other Valve employees or whatever banned people for arguing against this new mod thing. They are not better than EA, UBI or whatever. I mean, just to bring an example here, on GOG the ban from community is the very last resource moderators consider.
Gabe is the face of the company, trying to give a good reflection of what Valve is or it should be, but it isn't anymore. I still think Steam is a good service, but lately Valve introduced so many things trying to say "Ehi, this is for the players", while it's for Valve and software house only, really. The day Gabe Newell will leave Valve, Valve will turn into an EA or whatever, maybe even worse since they own the largest cut on the market.
If I remember well yes, they are, they keep poping around, no matter how many you'll do.