I thought that patchers could submit their work to EA and in exchange they make the game more patch friendly and give some nice editors to the comunity (for the headshapes, sounds etc).
It could be like you allow EA to use your work in the next Live edition and they credit you and give you free EA games.
You can say: What? I'm going to do EA's work and only get a silly pair of games?
If not, you will keep doing patches and for limited users, and the patches are just graphics, which are a little part of a Game. And if you get credit for it, well it's a chance to go into game developing.
Problems that could appear with this are proving it's your work; or EA has already graphic designers, why bother when few people would notice a slight difference in the graphics, and we will keep selling the same number of NBA Lives.