Brizz, the person who suggested that would be me.
My response to you is: Way to blow things out of proportion.
What I said was that making a mod that noone will play is a pointless act, unless the modding process itself is what your main interest is. For most, it's the end result, not the process.
This has nothing to do with fame, and everything with satisfaction in your work. When you suggest that it's retarded to make a mod for the fame, consider how it would sound to you if I told you that all the movies out (even the cinema/high culture ones) are success stories, and that there are millions more movies made every day that noone is allowed to see.
Of course you're going to be interested in/be enjoying the process of creating mods, else you're spending your time on the wrong hobby. However, you don't make paintings and then throw them away ... you want to look at the end result.
The end result of a mod is people playing it.
That has nothing to do with fame and everything with common sense.
Also, the other 99% (according to your statistics) of mods that are made to NOT be played, or only by the modder himself, aren't mods we'll ever see on the internet and as such do not relate to this discussion about why there aren't any mods on the internet. Or to put it differently, they do not change the fact that there are very few mods out.
Who cares if I have a zillion completed, playtested and awesome UT3 mods on my harddrive if I'm not sharing them?