It's a good thing, overall. I'm sure of it. The best prior example of this situation I can think of is books. It used to be that each book had to be painstakingly drawn with meticulous detail by monks. If you wanted a nice illustrated copy of the Bible, you'd better get your order in - it'd take a year to arrive, and you'd probably have to pay through the nose for it, too. Then, along came the printing press. Suddenly books were, if not free, available to anyone with a moderate effort. The rest is history.
Of course, most of the early printed books weren't original - they were variations on religious works, hymn collections and the like. Even before the press, many original (secular) books had been created, but they were restricted by the same distribution problems, so they never became popular, and it was a time before they were regularly printed too.
Nowadays, there's a Bible in just every other hotel room (I found one in my student room, even). There's a lot of really bad novels, too. But there are also works of true artistry, like "The Lord of the Rings", and everyone can enjoy them, and perhaps hope to make their own.
I think you'll agree that was slightly rambling, but my point is that technology is a tool. What I think people should be looking at is the *number* of good skinners and the number of good skins out there. Say half the WB skins out there are purely useless (and I wouldn't). That still means there are 800 skins of worth. I don't think there would be half that number without SkinStudio, and they *wouldn't* all be great.
Skinning tools are incredibly useful, especially for getting new blood into skinning. And at the end of it all, skinning's little use if people can't participate in it. Personally, I still use notepad, beta-test my skins before release and agonize over every update. But that's just me, and I don't end up producing many skins.
