Deffo a bit of both, but hard leans to "that way to begin with". I've helped a couple female friends set their stuff up, and they're friends for a reason.
its like that argument about pirating video games or movies. Many of those that pirate never had any intent of paying either way. But plenty pirate something, decide its worth the money, then buy it
unfortunately, that is always a possibility. its why its always been a huge sticking point in other areas (like games and movies). For some, the bad sadly outweighs the good (which sucks).
For a moment, let's just look at it from a humanistic level as to why they overcharge and not make the assumption that it's because they're overestimating the value of their content and their body.
Nice Office reference.
Fuck bitches that do this tbh. It's your content, so you're free to do what you want with it, but don't whine about pirating and people sharing your shit when you delete your own videos because "muh feelings."
I'd agree with you that vanity is probably a leading or the leading reason/justification. My trip is considering a person's motives and several likely possibilities before jumping to conclusions - namely when a particular creator is over-charging - because it helps me keep my morals in check and to avoid unnecessarily objectifying a human being doing something admittedly degrading so we can be stimulated/satisfied. If to me, they seem like a shitty person or a grifter, then they deserve what other people say about them in a lot of cases.
Maybe I am wrong, but I think that amature showing nude body does not require tremendous skill or effort. While other content creators in youtube or patreon such as musicians, teachers, entertainers put tremendous amounts of effort into their efforts - you need skill to play guitar, you need to study and study well for an educative video especially about some hard stuff like programming, maths or biochemistry, you need to be really good to play doom on nightmare difficulty and than usually editing video is really hard and time consuming, some technical videos take monthes to make, like doing crazy stuff like making portable nintendo consoles , redesigning lasers etc . And they do it for free!!! Or they have quite cheap patreon. What do you need to make an amature nude photo/video? Take clothes off, put phone or camera , start posing. Yes it needs some effort and knowledge to organize place, make lights, choose pose, check photoes and edit videos, yes you need some skills and yes you need a decent camera but anyway it is much more easier than making aforementioned musical/educating/gaming content.
Sometimes softcore creators don't do hardcore because they want to increase the price of their new exclusive " I finally show my boobs!!!" or " I show my butthole!!!" and then they sell it for stupidly high money.
I've periodically thought the same sentiment you expressed - it takes little to no effort to take a nude selfie or some sexy/lewd act in one's bedroom or bathroom and make a photoset/video set out of that. You summed it up otherwise quite well. I think the idea of it being really easy to make qualifying porn/sexual content feeds into the trope of porn stars and sex workers being pretty dumb in general and not qualified for much else.
Going through this at the moment tbh. I was subbed to one girl who was putting out decent content, and it got to the point where nobody else was contributing anymore so it was just me. Now she's moved platforms and hiked her prices up by 300% and I just can't justify spending that much a month. Shit thing is that most people who were posting before me have given up since they didn't feel the need to anymore.