Gothic_Temptation See, you are again thinking that the old system works just because it works now and you do not see anything happening. Fan translators have always been doing something illegal, lawfully speaking, but it was a gray area since the copyright holder (Webnovel) did not enforce its copyright.
Now, Webnovel is beginning to strongly push into the international market. Things are changing from that. Just because no lawsuits have been made does not mean that none of that will happen in the future.
You can definitely call Webnovel a plague from a reader's standpoint since you are removing the power fan translators have and preventing them from making the money they could be making without the publisher or authors involved. But things ARE changing.
The community could have done anything and steered their own course without the copyright holders involved (2+ years ago), but that's no longer going to happen. Now, 17k and Zongheng, and many other Chinese online literature outlets know what's happening overseas. There is a push from the government to continue this momentum. The other publishers might choose not to put paywalls and all sorts of unpopular moves to kill Webnovel. That is definitely possible, and perhaps it's a good thing, giving Webnovel some competition, but I'm saying that the reign of fan translators is already on a decline.
And if you know the Chinese government, once they set the vision, the other companies will abide to the government's calling. So the other publishers will not stay silent for long. They might be doing their market research this very moment.
Pictures from that meeting:


This one below is a forum on copyright protection for online literature during the conference.

All the publishers involved in this conference:

Or you can see all the involved publishers at the bottom of the page. Every single big name publisher is there.
The website involving this meet: http://www.colpc.cn/
The above is just me saying that the climate is changing for fan translators and that they should be prepared for change.
In short, I'm telling you things are changing. There's no point being idealistic about how great the good old days are because things are changing right now.
This debate devolved from the fact that I'm saying that translators are the problem when it comes to picking up books. And this problem is common throughout the entire sector percentage-wise. Translators come and go all the time, but you insisted that it's a Webnovel problem. Do you know Webnovel has more than 300 translators employed? Just 20 books dropped is not even 10%.
Then you started saying that all of this can be avoided if we just go back to the old system, but I'm telling you that the old system will never return due to legal reasons.