in all fairness if you're asking for an alteration then the hackwriter has every right to ask for a little to fill his/her pocket, asking for code customisation is alot different to asking for support.
my only gribe with vb.org is that theirs less of a community front in the coding forum (php, xhtml, etc) and all the php helpers/guru's have abandoned the irc channel. (don't get me wrong theirs still alot of help to be had, just not as many folk around as their used to be

)
regarding hacks, it's fine, theirs alot of stuff being released and very regularly too. and mostly with support to boot, supporting a hack is time consuming, it recently took me weeks to update one of my hacks.