Ask HN: How would you design a business model that supports plugin-writers?

I use Obsidian heavily on a daily basis, and I love it, but without the plugin ecosystem it would be far less usable. Most of the plugin authors are just doing the work because they have a passion for it, which eventually fades. They have funding links but I think there's too much friction in the process for many people to actually send funds to them. So, I've been trying to come up with a way to make a software product that can meaningfully reward high-quality plugin contributions, but the issue of fairness is hard to sort out.

My best shot at it currently is to have a subscription that allows plugins to be installed, and then just evenly splits each user's subscription fee among the plugins that user has active. There are several ways this could be gamed. For example, you could break what would naturally be a single plugin into several that depend on each other in order to get a bigger slice of the income.

Have you seen or thought of any other models that are really good at this, and hard to game?