There's the thing... Data is infinite. Piracy isn't great - it does nothing to support creators - but existing structures siphon off most of the money before it ever gets to them anyways. We don't have a working system.

Donations rarely can support a single person these days, and frankly it seems to require being a public social media figure of some kind... And that's a skill unrelated to art or building things

I don't see an answer aside from ubi - some of us live to create things, and we'll do it whether we're paid or not, whether we even release it or not. Take away the unnecessary coercion to make what other people want to survive, and you remove the stress from all of us. There's no longer this requirement to monetize everything - we'll make weird and beautiful things that makes everyone's life better

Writing this, I had this idea for gaming in particular... What if you had a service where you paid whatever the creator demanded for a game (as we do now), but then your monthly spending was distributed based on your play time? Realistically, only steam or an app store could do something like this, but it seems like an interesting way to incentivize quality and lowering prices