I had to lock down my account and hide my inventory because at some point I got a pretty rare TF2 drop and I started being targeted by both scams and legit trade offers to the point where the spam made it hard to use the service.

This is an angle that often goes unconsidered. As someone with a valuable inventory, the social aspect of the service has been made all but completely unusable for me.

The profits made from the ingame markets aren’t that scuzzy until you realize they’re primarily making those profits from their f2p, in house developed games (tf2, cs, and dota). At the end of the day, Valve wants to make money. If all of their money comes from virtual items, the primary thing that will see any real dev time/effort is gonna be those virtual items. It’s profitable stagnation, and it’s bad for consumers.