Looking at this as a automotive body designer. Wages get up to 50-125 bucks a hour when freelancing which is very comparable to working thru a contract shop, designing auto parts in cad with all aspects of manufacturing in mind when delivering the product or parts they asked for. For a stylist in the auto field they get up to 75-250 a hour delivering the artistic characteristics of what the customer wants to see or feel etc etc… Playing the Engineer role or lead on jobs becomes like a highly paid lawyer. Could be a simple Consulting fee of 250-500 a hour. All these numbers are based on Freelancing work.
However the numbers will drop drastically when working for a Organization because the organization is picking up additional costs such as health care, Vacation time, Sick days etc etc. And they want there profit so they will charge the same price as the freelancer and capitalize on there work. Pays then would be like so
Automotive body designers top wage could be 36- 42 (Bill rate is still something between 50-125 bucks a hour the agency pays you out of this)
Its sad to think of game development wages are less then the auto designers, But there is safety measures and that makes a difference.
So looking at numbers like this and that, I can see why the Developers of this game have decided to put a Small team in play , and USE the community to make there money on the game.
Your point is well taken although I am not sure I would put modeling car parts that are going to be 3d printed and implemented on real world cars in the same realm as making a car model that is gonna be driven around a digital world.