I didn't plan for there to be a third part to this, but reactions today have been frequent, passionate and written from many different perspectives. If you click on the above strip, you can read Tycho's news post for the day that explains why he would write such a strip. I'm not going to reprint it here, but I would like to address some of the points with which he, and others, have taken issue with.
Quality is subjective and difficult to quantify.
Let's move on and get back to that in a bit. It's been way too easy for anyone to earn a lot of money off of their website and now things are starting to shake out. People are going to have to really hustle to make it and only quality content is going to survive. If the barrier of entry for new cartoonists is raised to a point beyond where anyone can have a shot at getting their art to the world, then we're in bad shape. At this point, I don't see that being an issue.