Part of the issue is that Spore is a really old game that back in the day required CD-Key's to function and authenticate. This is something you just don't see anymore with modern titles. One of my suggestions to Bazajaytee was when the servers went down for months in 2017 was to revamp this legacy system but unfortunately nothing ever happened. To be honest it's quite incredible the servers even returned.
The Steam version of Spore absolutely needs to have a warning attached to it that clearly shows online functionality and modding support is severely broken in that version.
I haven't spoken to Bazajaytee in about a year, but I will try to query around regardless and see if this can be rectified.
