M/M - Money or Mod?

P/S: This is not a cocky post. I was very confused.

We need money to mod. True. We need shit loads of money to come up with a superb mod. True, if you've just seen a male ant tried and succeeded in humping a female cheetah. Some of you may know about all the hype Paperazzi cooked up. Fronted on TBCS and nominated for BT's MoTM. But I'm still wondering about one question. So I took a couple of hours to ponder. This question is even harder than "Do you wanna (and you must) screw Sami Vellu or Najib, and death is not an option?". Really, cos I'm the owner of Paperazzi thats why its bloody dot com damn hard.

"How come this cheap ass mod can even get more than a bit of hype???"

OK, I maybe the first to use paper, but hell, theres basically NO CUTS on the case itself. During chats I see the words "rich people's mod" come up very often. Then I start to get the connection. I look at the down-side of Paperazzi. You can have a case purely made out of gold, mine is only of shredded scrap paper. You can have the widest range of tool, the biggest workshop with cutting edge technologies, I only have basic hand tools. You can plan extremely well with uber sketches on SketchUp or AutoCAD, I never planned for Paperazzi. I summed up my "brainstorming while I count spiderwebs on the ceiling" session with one line.

Modding = money can't buy originality nor creativity.

Well, unless if you outsource the idea lol but I don't think any pure modder would even do that. So far we've seen very few epic mods coming from modders who have high-end tools. Among the epic ones, Paul Capello is still the one I consider the top modder on my list tho he's retired. Defyant, willettfx, Wolverine, Datamancer, Bill Owen, TribalOverkill lines up after that, with the list rolling. These are truly people who can do "money+mod" instead of "money or mod". They have the tools and money to roll, but they didn't forget to chuck in originality and creativity as deep as the core of the earth into their mod, down to the smallest detail. Most of the $ mods, well, turn out to be good-looking-but-nothing-new mods in the end compared to the length these epic modders can go.

Paul Capello's Doom 3 Mod

I guess the answer to the question is because I brought something new to the table that's quite impossible in the eyes of others. Spending a few sleepless nights rolling on the bed on answering "how" during the modding process does pay off. And previously, I was thinking its all about the moolah to get your mods noticed. This project really made me understand the essential elements of modding. Now I can sleep without having to look at the ceiling for 3-4 hours and go to the office looking like this when I get a new job:

Wake me up when Anwar becomes PM

P/S: Again, this is not a cocky post. I'm still not satisfied with this mod.