They are indeed looking in the wrong places.
Lots of open source gaming efforts have enough coders and few artists.
Art is very different from Code. I can do both, but I am much better on the art stuff then the code stuff.
What people doing those mods have to realise is that coders are not going to put a shitload of time into something they can't use for anything else. If they think they can get people to make something that is ultra specific for their game or whatever then they are mistaken.. they have to put the effort into using pre-existing stuff and modifying that to work. Then if coders can use that code in other games and other things then they are much more likely to help out. Hence the need for these mods to use open source licenses... which is impossible because the vast majority of them are going to be all based on proprietary software at their core.
All this open source, code reuse stuff will probably reduce the performance of the code somewhat, make it more crusty, and it'll make it much more difficult to do the OMG-GPU-SHADER latest-greatest stuff, but it's just how it works. At the end it'll work out to a net gain.
Now that's a coder's perspective.
From a Artist's perspective you're, of course, going to want to make something that is cool and is cutting edge. Art reuse is not that important... sure you can do some sound effects or mood music and some textures and models and such.. but that's only small things. For each game it's going to be pretty much a one-off thing. Each character, each storyline, each adventure you create is going to be for one part of one game. The skills you learn are what you transfer from one thing to another.. not the actual art.
Art is expressed in the actual act of creation and in the mind of the user's/observer's.. not in the end product, not the object.
With art you can't do something like make a mathmatical standard for a nice looking sunset and then put that in a 'art library' were people can add some special strokes and make all sorts of different nice looking sunsets.. Each image is going to be unique.
But with code you'd figure out how to load a image into a game and make that generic and put it in a library. Then anybody can use that library to load any image of a sunset they want.
There is a lot of overlap, but they are fundamentally different things with different approaches.
It's kinda like the difference between building race cars and being a race car driver, except bigger.