the community beat them to the punch and did a better job than the professionals would have.

This is a recurring thing in many games with mods now which is both good and bad.

The bad is the bit you mentioned which means the companies are lazy fucks who don't bother spending more resources because they're also greedy fucks.

The good is that the modding options not only give players a better experience [X-COM 2 for example has been revitalized several times over with mods, as has Stellaris where both have entire reworks to the game like Long War 2 and Star Trek: Horizons respectively.]

Not only does this give many modders a ways to work on things they are passionate about but it also lets them improve their skills as they learn various tools needed. Capnbubs is/was a modder for X-COM 2 that added in some entirely aesthetic head costume parts and because he did so well,

1. His mods for the base game and War of the Chosen expansion sits in 2 of the top 4 spots for Most Popular of All Time on the Steam mod library.

2. He was hired by Long War Studios/Pavonis Interactive meaning it led to an actual job.

LWS/Pavonis were themselves originally just players/modders who wanted to play the game a bit differently with the original LW mod however with LW2 they actually worked with Firaxis months before X-COM 2 was released. You can check the release dates for their first 3 mods, [SMG pack, Leader Pack, Alien Pack] and see they were put up on Steam on the 15th and 17th of December 2015. X-COM 2 didn't release until the 5th of Feb 2016 almost 2 months later. So they'd been working with the devs of the game in several ways to help create the modular functionality of the mod library, something that still breaths live into the game despite it being almost 6 years old now.

LWS/Pavonis are now making their own game with the experience they developed from LW and LW2 and hopefully they don't go down the same Epic sellout route Julian Gallop did with Phoenix Point seeing as how that majorly pissed off not only a lot of fans of the Strategy game series but also various backers who would not only take the option to reverse their original backing of the game, [because Epic literally just threw money at PP so it was no longer needed], but also then boycotted the game because it went Epic Store exclusive after the funding went through.

Which ties into the other problem with modders going more pro. Often it means shifting from a more casual working environment to one with hard deadlines and worse, top down management interference.

Sure a modder working on commission is still doing what they are told by the commissioner but there likely won't be a deadline in play so the finished product won't be rush and have content cut/incomplete. There may even be a back and forth going on during development so changes can happen both ways where the commissioner gets to see things that can/can't be done they didn't know about so change their mind at the suggestion of the modder, and the modder takes on feedback about the development if the commission changes in some way.

Stellaris has had this happen with several species portraits before. Silfae was a modder who made a lot of species packs before being hired by Paradox however since then not only has their own work quality fallen [likely due to the lack of personal freedom creating things] but they've also become quite sour as a person when interacting with other players. Before when they were making portraits they wanted on their own time they would have had nobody else telling them to get things done "By Friday" or forcing changes on previous passion projects while now they're just another wageslave making a dollar for a company.