Blender artists > not industry conform

While I understand the OP's frustration, I also think it'sa bit like complaining about the Internet overall: In any creative field you can encounter the sublime right next to absolute garbage. Any creative platform has this issue, from Youtube over Soundcloud to every 3d platform. It's the unavoidable downside of these platforms being available to anyone with a computer and the urge to be creative while not necessarily having the talent or experience.
The only viable solution is educating yourself, knowing what to look for and what to avoid. With a bit of training that isn't too hard.
If you choose to purchase a model presented with one crappy render, you shouldn't be surprised if it's not up to industry standards.
If the artist shows several good renders and presents images that demonstrate good topology and a clear understanding of the tech aspects, you're most likely getting a good product. Also, the rating system is a pretty good indicator most of the time.

Someone with 32 years of experience in creating 3D models should be able to distinguish good from bad models before buying it. If the presentation, description and author reputation is not good enough to be sure it's industry standard just don't buy it.

Well, in my opinion, a huge number of people install Blender just for fun, without even thinking about some kind of career in 3D. Most of them don't think about industry and quality. Proof of this are the countless upload donuts, mugs, stools and simple cubes. What industry are we talking about? :) Of course there are exceptions, for example Michael Weisheim Beresin but there are very few such examples.

Content moderation is certainly good, but only in theory. How to organize the work of a team that will check files created in DAZ Studio, Inventor, SolidWorks, 3DS Max, Maya, Sketchup, ZBrush, Lightwave, etc. a hundred more different editors. Buy corporate licenses for all software? How do you imagine a computer on which 100-200 different editors will be installed? :) How much will it be necessary to pay a moderator who will have to analyze files of hundreds different formats, understand all kinds of modeling, etc? Reduce the list of formats leaving only the 5-10 most popular? I think it would look like a very strange "upgrade" for both buyers and sellers. Therefore, the idea may be good, but unfortunately not realizable.

Not sure Blender is the problem here. People looking for that quick buck would just turn to pirated software in any case. As previous poster said, Blender has become a big thing, and a lot of indies, who may later go on to commercial software, often start there. In my experience, indie customers far, far outweigh commercial organisations. I've started recently offering Blender format alongside my other formats, and this has proven a good thing.

As for moderation ... I've worked on sites which have had heavy moderation, and it is much more of a pain in the arse then you might think. Not only is there a huge delay to get published, often there are rejections for completely invalid reasons which then need to be chased and overturned. I get it, the moderators are busy and need to rush things through, and with so many different formats out there, they can't be experts in everything. Not to mention the incredible workload this adds to the site. It's enough of a hassle having to email CGT every few months to ask them to "approve" my low poly models.

To be honest, I see the hands off approach at CGT as one of its strong points, from a sellers point of view in any case, but I appreciate this will increase the likelihood of customers getting defective products. Sellers putting up defective products don't last in the long term, but I'm not sure what's the best short term answer; surely you can get a refund for a product that is defective, and buyers should get clued in by the sellers rating, reviews, etc. Dunno.

I've been offering the .blend file format as part of my personal catalog with almost any product I've created for the past couple of years. Blender has recently become a major tool in my personal creation workflow. Previously I worked almost exclusively with 3dsmax, and I still do offer that as an optional file format with most of my products. However, over the last couple of years, Blender has become the featured native file format for most of my products for a few reasons. The .blend file format does offer some convenient features I really like as a content creator that native file formats in some other packages do not have (If you know how to utilize them) and with Blender's increasing popularity among average users, I think it could be worth having as a viable option for most products.

I understand the frustration though. Since Blender is free, there are some people who jump on board the bandwagon and feel as if they can just sell anything they create overnight for a quick buck. We all know that's not the case and typically those types of individuals will fail in the marketplace anyway. Stolen content has always been an issue ever since 3d content marketplaces first came into existence.

Author of the topic is right, cgt is flooded with garbage models that can't be used anywhere, most of them are bad even as free models. There are all sorts of garbage models, starting from beginners who don't realize how strong competition is and how much they have to learn in order to be competitive (hey everything can be sold for 2$ right?), but greed for money is stronger than anything, then you have thieves who knows nothing about 3d, and they just upload ripped game models found on the warez sites with bad UVs, bad normals corrupt textures, bad scale etc. Usually same renders from warez sites are used here as preview images. Then you have artists who don't know what 3d printable model is, and they just throw a shell without any thickness with bad topology etc, or are trying to sell stolen ripped game models as 3d printable ones because 3d printable models are "IN" nowdays and "that's where money is". The problem is lack of moderation here on cgt, so anyone can upload anything and that's it. There is 0 control over what is uploaded. If cgt just start checking what is uploaded, situation would change dramatically, I don't care if it will took 2-3-5-10 days in order for model to be accepted and published, a lot of "artists" who aren't competent would give up, because there would be no sense to upload stolen or technically bad models just to find out 2-3-5-10 days later that it can't be accepted.

Choose something from Maya, Max, C4d, Modo, SketchUp, ZBrush, Houdini, Daz, Wings, Fusion, Rhino, Lightwave, Poser etc. users, or you can just download
MakeHuman and create your own rigged characters for free (with great topology).

...and try to calm down, you will end up getting a - not industry conform - heart attac...