You've actually touched on something that underlies my deep dislike of modding. Skyrim, for me, is a one-shot game: you can play it now and then you might as well throw it away because mods are ephemeral and Skyrim simply does not work without them. Years from now, you might be able to install the game from Steam but will you be able to get SKSE, SkyUI, the borderless-windowed mod that makes it run decently? Will they all work? The modders will be long gone, the community will be dead (this will happen, overnight, as soon as the next TES game is released) and nobody will care about it. To be honest, Steam does not need to support paid mods. Instead, the developers should employ some talent scouts and actually *participate* in the communities that surround their games. Modders are not professionals but there's no reason why the developers couldn't get hold of them and, with their professional and business experience, make a deal with them to wrap up and publish hand-picked mods as paid DLC packages, in exchange for a profit share. I'd buy SkyUI as a DLC if some of that money went to the dude who made the mod and it was published as a proper one-click package!

Thus ends the single known example of Early Access done properly. Truly, this was a bitter-sweet moment in gaming history.

I agree with what you say but it's a bit like saying dirt roads should never have been replaced with tarred ones because people drive badly or automobile manufacturers build sub-standard cars. (The second simile is probably more appropriate.) I perceive this to be a largely incremental improvement - it isn't exactly revolutionary. Nevertheless, for real web developers who use it properly, it is still a good thing in my opinion. (You forgot to mention popular and horrific "depend on everything" development practices and, in the world of Javascript, "inline it too" - I'm thinking of OpenLayers 3 which in-lines Google Closure!)

While I do agree that "a lot of simple has disappeared from the internet", I don't think that I will miss the ability to test via telnet. Most HTTP end-points are too complex to test via telnet anyway and, as long as it always remains a simple request/response dialogue between client and server, I don't think any real complexity has crept in.

The post even has counter-arguments and links to stuff. Are the 90's back again? Do I hear rave music, modem hand-shake tones and browser wars?