Actually, Badfaerie, you are witnessing one of the major drawbacks.
People gaming the system. However, expecting to get paid for a freebie is one of those things that bothers me about the attitudes involved. I've seen how the financial outlay was an incentive to improve on the quality of the work. I've seen it preached that this is the new way of capitalism...
No, it is not...
And to have people steal other people's model and then monetarily benefit from that as well. (Please see the threads on Dalamatier.) Yeah, no. Better the program be terminated. If the Site cannot adequately police itself to protect against the abuse of such systems, then it should not be run. It is only going to hurt people like you in the long term.
A few bad apple have made it clear that the system is too flawed to be run in it's present state.