Okay, brushing the dust off my Published Professional hat here:
Most good and worthy things are never read/seen/used at all. I guarantee you that there are many, many unsold/unpublished manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, games, movies, music, sim lots, and other creations out there that are as good as and better than ones that have won awards, gotten wildly popular, been downloaded thousands of times, and become widely known or at least influential within some subculture. Either the creator never desired publication enough to attempt to get it a wider audience than their own home or even their own eyes, or they strained every nerve after it and never quite made it. I've got several of those myself and I promise you, the lesbian western and rest of them are as good as and better than anything I ever persuaded anyone to pay me for. It's true in all fields. Many great chefs only ever fed their own family. You don't have to be a famous designer to make you niece a quinceanera dress that makes her feel like a queen from a pattern of your own drafting.
Meanwhile, among the works that have made it to the public - whether the small public of a 20-year-old videogame, or the larger public of a place like AO3, or actual major professional platforms like Hollywood movie studios - both critical acclaim and popularity are total crapshoots. Not only is there a "lowest common denominator" factor that tells against higher-quality creations (for much of the best work is difficult to appreciate without a certain level of experience in the medium while much that is flashy and shallow on closer inspection dazzles even experts at first sight), but the number of elements that aren't related to the work's quality at all come into play. How much and how effectively is the work promoted? What uncontrollable topical factors help or hinder the potential audience from finding it? Do any Influential People come across it and make more people aware of it? What is happening in the surrounding industry? What else was going on the day it dropped?
On top of this - most people don't ever think of doing the things that let a creator know that they're even encountering the work, let alone loving it, using it, returning to it again and again; and if they do think of it, they're often too tired, or too shy, or too pressed for time to do it. When was the last time you hit the Thanks button on a download, or commented on a fic, or sent fanmail? We all like too many things to go out of our way to say anything about the bulk of it to anyone at all, let alone to the creator.
And this is a problem, especially with amateur work like creating for Sims 2, because at least in a professional context you get money (theoretically; almost never enough, in practice, and always later than makes any sense), but an amateur is "paid" with appreciation and not getting any can starve them as much as not getting royalties in a timely manner can starve a professional.
There is nothing a creator can do to solve this problem (except to lead by example and be audibly and publicly appreciative of other people in the field and hope that what goes around comes around), so they must cope with it as best they can, by learning how Not to Starve and to make what they do get go as far as possible. We have to separate our ego from the Work and realize that the audience we can see is but the tip of the iceberg. There are always more people appreciating the work than are visible to us. Always. Even those who become visible may not surface for decades, and then only do so by accident. I sometimes console myself with the thought of some kid, fifty years after I die, running across one of my books by accident in a library, or a used book store, or his grandma's spare room, and reading it, and having some thought I never could have had, that the kid couldn't have thought without the book. Because that sort of thing happens all the time. I've been that kid for someone else, fairly often.
No one can decide for you whether this is worth it, or not. Every cost/benefit analysis is personal. I always told people who told me they wanted to be writers not to do it for publication unless it was the most important thing in the world to them, because the writing is great but the publishing is so, so hard. Writers gonna write; modders gonna mod; artists gonna art. But they don't have to share it unless they want to. And there's no denying that appreciation is one powerful motivation for doing so.
But consider this - you can't sell a manuscript you never submit, and you can't get featured with a lot you never upload.
Fellow San Antonian and award-winning but still mostly midlist author Bob Flynn used to (and probably still does) tell a story about how, some months after the publication of his book North to Yesterday, he was wakened by the telephone in the middle of the night. In those days if that happened you picked up because it was probably an emergency. But instead he was greeted by: "I just finished reading North to Yesterday and that ending is horrible! Why'd you end it like that?"
So Bob sat up in bed and answered the question, and he and the total stranger at the other end had a long conversation about the book. By the end the caller was much mollified, and was about to hang up when he suddenly realized that they weren't in the same time zone. "Oh, my God, it must be two in the morning where you are! I am so sorry."
"That's all right," said Bob. "I'm just glad to know somebody read the thing."
Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr is
Sim Media Res .
Widespot,
Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and
Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)