The problem with the Skyrim and generally the Bethesda mod scene is that the barrier to entry is very low, for this experiment the last thing you want is a host of shoddily made crap being the flagbearers.
https://imgur.com/a/bqcla?gallery Although the protest mods this spawned (extra apple lite being my favourite) also show the best of not stifling ideas behind a skill wall.
Still, the modding scene for those games is full of absolute dreck and finding the flecks of gold in the dung heap is almost a game in itself, certainly a very time consuming one. Even then, when you move into that level of customisation of experience, it becomes very hard to settle for the prescribed options. Finding a great looking armour set, for example, only for its stats to be game breaking and the ease of its acquisition even more so. Curation and community input are vital when there's so much out there which means a saturated and mature modding community was a poor testing ground for this. Although if they'd stuck it out i'm sure things would have settled.
I'm not against charging at all. I've been PC gaming almost 20 years (fuck, just realised that) and the number of games that have been "saved" by mods is massive. I'm a big TW fan but if it wasn't for mods Empire would have been my last. Shogun 2 I played for less than an hour before modding it. I think i've played over 300 hours now. While CA still deserve my cash for creating a base, the guys behind DEI for Rome 2 deserve something for providing the majority of my enjoyment from that game.
Thinking about it Rome 2 or Attila would have been a better game to have rolled this out on. There would still be a lot of drama but the modding scene there would be more suitable. Although the high level of cooperation and compilation most of the mods rely on could make it destructive...