Quite often with these new ideas that come out of left field, the pendulum swings the other way after a certain point. While I like Kickstarter and other such projects (a lot of cool gizmos would not see the light of day were it not for Kickstarter), I fully expect the next year or so to be peppered with reports about fraud, etc. in the popular media.
It used to be that if you had a widget that you wanted built at scale, you had 2 options: mortgage the house (and bug the relatives for cash), or approach one of the big guys and beg them for help. With Kickstarter, you don't need the big guys anymore. And as with any other such change where the Old Guard gets sidetracked, expect them to fight back with scare stories and mockery.
Say Joss Whedon wanted to raise $10 million for a show. With Kickstarter he'd have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them. If you had an agency roll this into existing services, maybe with a nominal fee, the big names may be more comfortable with that anyway...
I'm not sure it was possible to pick a worse example. Dr. Horrible is quite possibly the Hollywood project most desperately calling out for fan funding that has ever actually been made, and it was still only made because he just put up the money and hoped for the best. Concrete evidence would suggest that he's not capable of raising millions of dollars from fans without some assistance, because if he could have, he would have then.
Using the Wasteland 2 average donation of call-it-$50 ($47.86), is $500,000 that excessive for coordinating and aggregating the donations of 200,000 people? That's not free. Joss can't avoid paying something for that service. Perhaps someday they'll move to taking a flat fee per donation, though that would also require Amazon and the other payment processors Kickstarter uses to go to flat fees too, which seems unlikely.
I'll draw your attention to the fact that the big videogame kickstarters have been for franchises that have been dormant for decades. Surely their principals wanted to bring them back sooner. If they could raise this kind of money, why didn't they do it in 2008? The answer, of course, is that they couldn't do it in 2008. But they can in 2012. And Whedon could in 2012 as well.
In the same way that Twitter is "just a database of SMS messages", Kickstarter is just a "payment checkout" - but of course they are both greater than the sum of their parts.
Their execution isn't that hard to compete with, it can be commoditized with enough resources, and for someone with actual fame I don't think they increase the amount raised by much.
If not Whedon, think Lady Gaga or JK Rowling. What would Kickstarter offer them that some private white label processing service couldn't copy?
Seems to me that for someone who doesn't already have a large fan base, a Kickstarter campaign could easily increase their take by a factor of 4 (if not 10 or 100 or 1000). For someone well-known like Whedon the factor will be smaller, but if it's 1.5 or even 1.2, the 5% fee is more than covered.
And regardless of whether you like it or not, it is the standard abbreviation in the financial world.
