The Store is ruining gathering profiles.

Make a request for profiles. There are still people willing to help for free.

 

I think that the store is great: it gives people an incentive to make high quality profiles, plugins, botbases, and combat routines. HOWEVER, currently it is very difficult to determine the true quality of these products.

Sure, you can demo some of them for a limited amount of time, and sure there is a forum where you can look at a 200 page topic on the matter, but why doesn't the store have the features that basically any other e-commerce site has?

Reviews, on page comments, better showcasing space, etc. are all ways that I think would allow the community to sort of self-moderate the items on the store. If a profile maker gets a reputation for making shitty profiles, this will be readily apparent. If a profile just straight up doesn't work, you'll see that on the page.

Implement stats, and community review capabilities, and the store quality will skyrocket. Let us see access stats like how many times a profile has been downloaded instead of just putting it in a "popular" category. Force developers to be transparent and up front. Just go look at sites like etsy, e-bay, amazon, and even social networks like reddit or pinterest, and you'll see plenty of features that could greatly improve the Buddy Store experience. I don't think that the buddy staff needs to get a report for every bad profile. Let the community influence the moderating and remove some of that responsibility (read: lagtime / delayed response) from the equation.

 

I just want to be able to edit the profiles i purchase to my liking.

This stores completely ruined that for me, there was never once a profile i got on this forum that I ran stock out of the box, i always made my own adjustments to it, so I would have a truly unique but still an optimal profile.

 

The issue here is with gathering profiles. I have no problem paying something extra to get a premium botbase that plays the AH for me or any kind of good botbase/plugin/profile, but with gather profiles it's something else.

First of all, gather profiles rely on feedback from the people who use them, in order to add blackspots to them. If you buy a profile pack or single profile from the store, you cannot modify it to bring in your own blackspots, you have to send the feedback to the creator and rely on him to add them in the next revision. But since most (or all?) gathering profiles don't have trials, the number of people using these profiles is much smaller than MoP for example when hundreds of people downloaded the profile, but some also left feedback.
Now, just like OP said, you pay xx euros for a profile pack and they all run into a mountain because they dont have enough testing power to provide 100% error free profiles.

TL;DR paid gathering profiles are not tested enough to be considered premium products, since the whole process of perfecting them consists in masses of people using them, but the masses will not pay $$$ for untested profiles.