That's called "spintax" and the overall approach is known as article spinning[1]. There's a small industry of software tools that facilitate that sort of thing (e.g. The Best Spinner[2]). Seems to be dying out as that kind of posting is more likely to get you penalized quickly nowadays rather than produce any real results.
I don't know how either one works well, but I saw some similarities, and with my limited knowledge of how that name generator format works I would know either more or less about how article spinning works.
Yep, this is how forums work. Tools are very rare compared to other sold services because making tools are hard, and making a tool that people want to buy even harder.
You may see software like TheBestSpinner, XRumer and another one I can't remember the name of, basically a Wordpress comment spammer cannon that sell thousands of copies, more than that person would make using these tools themselves.
I'm surprised no one with an eye towards reducing the number/variety of such tools has inflicted an intentional App Store-style price race to the bottom by creating such a tool, preferably a superior one, and selling it well under cost (e.g. $1.00) to make it unprofitable to develop them. Might take multiple "competing" tools to cause this to occur, of course, and at some point they'd want to stop supplying their tools.
Of course, your $100 price might be a figure pulled out of thin air, not an accurate one.
It isn't that simple. There are other issues that the developers may not want to deal with in using their own tech. Access to proxies is a big one. Obtaining lists of sites with enough traffic/page rank for this to matter is another.
That said, these blackhat forums tend to be full of people with little money. Many users are from places like India and Pakistan, trying whatever they can to eke out an existence. Since almost none of the users on those forums have money to buy the tools (even $100 is a very high price point for products on these forums), writing tools for them is a fool's errand.
People creating this stuff need something to sell so might as well sell something they know something about already. Sort of how marketing experts will market their own marketing teleseminars, etc.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning [2]http://thebestspinner.com/