He said nobody paid him to be a part of this ceremony, but they did pay other people to participate....
Nothing shady about that. Todd went on a long road trip, staying at an unpredictable motel, buying a disposable computer and thoroughly destroying it afterwards, generally making lots of expenses for which Zcash reimbursed him.
Snowden probably chose to make negligible expenses and declined to be paid.
Nothing unusual there.
Now even if zcash is to become without this trusted setup they will always have this suspicious shady history and it's never going to be widely accepted.
If you want to talk about shady history, look at Cryptonote's origin with the Bytecoin scam and the purposely obfuscated inefficient miner software...