Was it really necessary to bump a thread from over two years ago?

As to what you are missing.  You are missing the fact that the "miners" are compensated in two ways.  They receive a "block subsidy" (currently 25 BTC) of newly minted bitcoins for every block they solve, and they also receive the transaction fees of every transaction that they include in their block.

Over time, the block subsidy will shrink (it gets cut in half approximately every 4 years), and as bitcoin gains popularity, the value of the transaction fees will increase.  Eventually (long before the subsidy ends), miners will receive a larger portion of their compensation from fees than from the subsidy.  Perhaps then we'll stop calling them miners, and just call them "transaction processors" instead.  It doesn't really matter what we call them, they'll still be performing the exact same service and they'll continue to be compensated for that.