You must be kidding. Do you expect people to find, buy, and then solder really small surface mount components by hand? And they have to risk destroying a gaming card that costs hundreds of dollars when they could just buy a Quadro or Firepro and be done with it?
Modding a gaming card that costs hundreds of dollars modded to a professional card that that cost thousands of dollars makes sense to me. If you don't know how to do the solder yourself, you can pay for that service at some electronic shop with appropiated tools for the job.
I don't see it too different to classical pencil tricks with Athlons XP's PCB bridges, just that these were done to merely overclock it, not to be able to use tuned Drivers that can drastically increase performance with the same GPU horsepower.
One of the things that I wasn't able to gather enough information about, is the results of a proper comparision between a GeForce or Radeon, a softmodded version of it with hacked Drivers or BIOS, and a hardmoded version of it like when changing resistors, and the proper equivalent Quadro or FirePro. Basically, I don't have idea if via modding you could archieve the exact same performance and features (Quadro K4000 is based on the GK106 die, so its pretty much the same as a GeForce GTX 660), or there are things that are fused off the die like Intel and AMD does with Processors that you can't enable again.
Softmodded versions seems to consistently provide better performance or enable some acceleration/features on applications that wouldn't let you to do it with a gaming card, but on some Benchmarks I saw on previous generations there was still differences with a proper professional card. Still, mods like these are popular to do on some circunstances that they were really proven to work. GeForces are modded to Quadros often when using a Hypervisor like Xen because is much more easier to do VGA passthrough to a VM that way.