You're obviously not a programmer. When I started my mod, updates in the beginning were large and frequent. Now they're small and infrequent. That's not because I'm making more money -- I'm still making nothing -- but because I ran out of low-hanging fruit. There's a well-known rule called the Pareto principle which states that roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (also known as the "80-20 Rule"). As any project gets larger, it takes more and more work to add anything new to it. Eventually, you get to the part where the last 20% of your results take 80% of your effort. Finally, you have no choice but to redesign everything to make it easier to add to it in the future, which takes a very long time and has a 50% chance (more recently, I heard 70% chance) of failing. You actually have to stop what you're doing to do a bunch of work that no one can see, and there's a good chance that you'll have to give up on it and throw it all away. You take that chance because you have to. Keeping things the way they are isn't an option.
Anyway, I'm glad that you've never taken on a project that got out of hand and had to learn about this principle the hard way. I have. DC has. Every major corporation has. It's just life. Bitching about it won't help, but at least you got to annoy some other people, right?