Posted on Skinbase....but reposted here to provide food for thought for those who may not go there all that often...

hobnobber...yes, basically all that is correct, though a more accurate estimate of those who contribute via skins, purchases, community input/interaction vs. those who only 'leech' for freebies is very much more than the ratio of 25 to 1....perhaps more in the realm of 2500 to 1....and that's the rub.
When skinning was in its infancy, say 5 years ago, it was all new and thrilling to everyone....now it has grown, not so much with newer apps coming on the scene on a daily basis...that was the 'norm' back in skinz.org [mk.1] days, but now the growth is in general interest/popularity, thanks to Microsoft's added awareness of the concept, with its visual styles, etc.
What you get now is many more 'users' but not a heck of a lot new blood in skinning as skinners as such....certainly not a comparable ratio to the popularity growth.
When once the skinners and their 'community' sites could foot the bill for all, as the majority were like-minded skinners themselves, now it's more a case of 'us and them'...the providers of product vs. the users of the product.
The dynamics have changed.  With this change comes commercial pressures on everyone involved.
New specifics require new handling.....people need to cater for the changes with methodology that makes the situation survivable or else viability suffers and the reality of the system falls apart.

Change can be horrid and unpalatable but may just be absolutely necessary and unavoidable.

Anyone involved in the game for long enough can see the writing on the wall....even since the dot-com failings of the likes of eFront that killed the first REAL skinning community we have been striving for sustainability.
Anyone with genuine heart-felt feelings for the skinning community as a whole will realise the necessity to not put heads in the sand and blindly hope life will magically go on as normal, but make a conscious effort to find a sustainable model.
Sure, many will arrive at alternate theories of a working model, but until tried no-one will be sure what actually will succeed or not.
All that can be done is to try our collective best, hence many soul-searching threads on the subject of 'the future of skinning' in one form or another on many/most sites.

Poor old Devart has a massive user-base and being a graphics site demands high bandwidth/server load as does any skinning site at their relative levels.

I remember what the world was like before skinning....[my first foray was with Dos GUI shells - pre Windows...then Win 3x and beyond] and would hate to see the whole skinning world fall apart due to ennui or apathy, hence the hands-on involvement.

Let's all look forward to skinning/GUI modification still being not just 'fun', but sustainable in another 5 years, or 50...