The thing about IDN's is that the whole enterprise lends itself to dishonesty and shady dealing. There is enough of that in regular domains, but IDN's take it to a whole other level. People don't seem to understand that for the most part a name only has value if you can imagine commerce taking place on that site. Lots of these IDN'ers don't even understand the cultures of the names they are peddling, and there is hardly agreement as to what most of the names actually mean.
People can make money in online poker, too, but the nature of the beast means that there is far more dishonesty in online poker than in almost any other online activity where big money changes hands. There may be a few honest IDN people, but for the most part, they are a shady bunch, who are more like penny stock pumpers. I used to love how those fools would do their translations of words and then have huge arguments among each other about whether the name really meant what someone said it did. And they don't understand the power of regular dotcom names, and why most every serious business with a worldwide presence has their name in dotcom. And they would say that there IDN's were actually dotcoms and got good traffic, totally missing the point that traffic is only good if the people doing the viewing have a pot to piss in and can conduct transactions.
Go to most forums and you will some IDN subforums that haven't had a post in years. There is a reason for that. Anyone who can legitimately make an honest dollar by selling an IDN to someone so that the buyer actually improves the bottom line of their business by more than the sales price should be applauded, but the percentage of buyers who are worse off for buying an IDN has to be 95 percent or higher. The sellers are the big winners, and that is dishonest business. The great businesses have the consumer, or buyer, as the winner. Businesses like APPLE. Notice that casinos go bankrupt all of the time. The customer is the big loser in that transaction. A solid transaction is one in which the seller can turn a profit, and the buyer is better off for having engaged in the transaction. That happens a very small percentage of the time in the IDN world.
Even with regalar dotcom sales, the focus is always on getting over on the buyer. Names that make the headlines are always the outrageous ones. You don't see many people making noise about selling a good name at a solid price, and mentioning how much of a good deal this was to the buyer. The whole mindset is that of a bad business person, and that is why domainers don't get the respect that they believe they deserve. Much like poker players.
99 percent of all domain names listed are listed for prices that the seller would never entertain buying for a fraction of that price.