It takes a couple of weeks to throw together a spectacular set of custom things from someone working in their spare time, and it takes months to create a product by people dedicating more than eight hours a day on it (remember the letter from the wife of someone complaining about how she never saw her gameprogramming husband?) but the custom creators deserve money, not the people who actually made the game that we all enjoy so much.
Ironic.
What I find ironic is that its seen as okay for a full team of expert programmers to make 60 objects in a few months, when a bunch of hackers in their spare time can throw the sixty together in half that. There were fixes for bugs in all three expansions in just days, here and other places, yet Maxis took until after Nightlife was released to fix University. And people were okay with that.
I'm all for a free market economy, but they only work if consumers are rational. Anyone who's ever even peaked into the BBS can tell that at least the consumers THERE aren't generally rational, which makes the whole market fall apart. 60 items and no interactions isn't worth *MY* $20, though I'm not against snagging it from someone else, or having my sisters buy it for me. The items are great yes, but J.M. makes better patches, and Numenor makes better items...and neither are trying to take $20 for it.
Hopefully this prices enough people out of the market that they won't do this for the next expansion. i doubt it though....