It works in a different way: the CC licences tell you what you can do without asking permission. All the things that are not permitted by the licence can be directly discussed with the rights' holder.
So, if you see a CC-BY-ND piece of work and you want to use it for commercial purposes you mail the author and ask them for permission, maybe offering some money in exchange.
This is the "dual licensing" principles that allow GPL software to be used in proprietary buying from the rights' holder an additional licence that covers what is forbidden by the public licence. MySQL and Qt are famous example of this licensing regime. The only practical problem is that there is no standardised way to express the additional rights one can buy outside the basic licence. The "CC plus" initiative tried to address this problem but it seems that it is no longer developed.
It is not CC that is not working for your; you have (understandable) problems dealing with 500 authors that do not share an agency.
CC images (BY-SA) could becoming a nice source of revenue thanks to Flickr (discovery) and their recent deal with Getty images (agency and rights bookkeeping). Right now Getty does not accept CC images, but once they will do this will greatly simplify the job of people that want to licence content without dealing directly with the authors.
It seems to me that this proposed change might allow us to use Creative Commons licensed images, which would certainly accelerate our path to market.