But modding fractures the community. One of the strengths of GT5 is, we are ALL playing the same game. You split the community up into factions that think x mod or y mod is the 'better' mod, and soon you have a MUCH smaller gamebase. And you STILL have the issue of, no matter WHAT safeties are put in place, someone considers them a challenge.
You're partially right, modding does fracture the community. But is that a bad thing? Let me explain.
Right now, if I go online, I already see a rather fractured community. This is by the very nature of the game. There are groups for every level of racing and rule set. Some only play DTM races, some want to keep driving their x2010, others just like to drift... it goes on and on.
What happens when mods come along is, you will see some large modding projects that aim to drastically improve the experience of one or a few aspects of the game.
For instance, I used to play a PC game called Sports Car GT. A decent semi-simulation racing game for it's time (1999). Among mods released for the game were a mod providing a full BTCC championship, or a mod creating drag-racing with all sorts of cars.
As you can imagine, this only improves the experiences players wanted to have in that direction anyhow. And because in this way new content keeps coming along for free, long after the release of a game, modding has proven to be greatly beneficial to keeping players with the game.
You state yourself that NO game is totally secure. Maybe on a PC, that's true. But so far, the PS3 remains essentially an even playing field. That is the CORE of what racing is about.
GT5 is an even field for now yes. The PS3, I'm sorry to say, is not. It's just as susceptible to exploits and hacks as any other computer system.
The recent jailbreak developments are very much proof of that. Other games on the PS3 have known exploits and whatnot for a long time already as well (Dirt 2 anyone?).