True enough.
I remember when you could buy and sell for free on ebay, it was an advertiser supported service. I was one of the very first people on eBay and have maintained a seller precense of various items from time to time under different IDs. I was part of eBay before it was cool.
And since then, it has really went to pasture - you can't do anything on there as far as selling goes without a fee now. It has gotten to the point where some sellers cannot use eBay anymore because the costs eat into thier margins too much. Then they started telling everyone what they could and couldn't sell. Thier latest move was to get rid of the adult section. I knew that was going to come eventually.
I know about the alternative auction sites - some of them are good and others are not. It all depends. And yes, there are lots of things you can do to accomplish the same things eBay charges for - and if you are good with web design you can custom script your own goodies to do what you want.
The biggest scam to me is thier picture hosting. The only time I use it is when I only have one photo to display because they dont charge for that - yet. Otherwise, I stick the pics up on my server and link to them from there.