I find the people involved in the con industry posting here to be interesting even when it's not directly tied to Vic. I'm not exaggerating when I say these random people speaking up like they're authorities are unimportant. I don't know who any of these people are, or that they even exist. Getting glimpse on how that world operates, and the tea on the drama whores involved, is always interesting.
The progression has been somewhat disappointing honestly. Anime cons started as an off-shoot out of SciFi cons that were trying to just give a rally point for a particular branch of nerds. (and if you dig back far enough, hilariously the original organizers were adamantly opposed to the monetary aspect of what cons are now specifically because they didn't want a bullshit cottage industry of assholes trying to profit off fans (like SciFi conventions of the time already had). For actors specifically, the progression went thusly (still kind of does really):
1. Whoa, I have fans? People know I was in anything at all? This is awesome.
2. I'm thrilled so many people love my work I want to meet them all
3. Holy crap, there's too many people, I can't go to all these events, I need to limit the options
4. Higher paycheck wins out, sorry, only so much of me to go around
5. Woo, welcome to my new career! Here's my agent so that I can ask for money without directly being the asshole
And then costhots trying to build their lucrative careers as camwhores joined in. Then rando douchebags realized many con orgs are lazy and could squeeze out paychecks for filling convention programming slots. And then you have a whole cottage industry of people who at worst decided that earning minimum wage entertaining morons for various weekends is less painful than working 30 hrs at Walmart each week, and VIOLA! the anime con scene in a nutshell.
I waited years for attendees to look around and realize they're being fleeced, now I just agree with PT Barnum. I've seen voice actors, con orgs and fans all geek out and get excited for rare glimpses behind the curtain of how anime is made. At the same time, I've also heard actors and con orgs and others (not always the same ones) bad mouth the fans and/or talk about how to separate them from their money. McManus runs WRAC, which is an acronym for "We Run Anime Cons" which is a clique for shitheads that are exactly as self-important as that name would imply.
EDIT: As an addendum to the above, the whole "pay for play" thing with voice actors generally started because the bigger cons got guests to attend and smaller conventions had trouble getting guests to sign on. Devoid of any real contacts and without the lure of thousands of people to lure the companies into either encouraging them to do it or just flat out super-exciting the guest at the opportunity, small cons had to pony up solid money to bring them out. (for a long time the largest cons could afford to just say "screw you, we'll have someone else") Nowadays, anime cons follow the comic/SciFi con model that they were explicitly trying to avoid many years ago.