Yearg, everything you said is reasonable and makes sense but again, it just doesn't fit well when you try to apply it to the culture of modding and why it's become as awesome as it is. I'm not sure what you mean with time working out the interconnectivity issues out on its own. Because many mods overlap and edit the same thing, it takes actual work to create a master load order and I just don't see how it's feasible if a team would have to go and purchase every mod to make a worthwhile sorter. It would no longer be feasible to run complementary or even a large number of mods because there's no way to sort out conflicts. As I said in my first post, maybe Bethesda could sort that out but they publicly abandon post-launch support once their next project ramps up.

This just isn't the same as DLC or cosmetic skins, build on top of the product without conflicting, and I think that's where some of Vivi's confusion is coming from.

Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
The only legitimate complaint that I think has fallen out of this is concerns about quality control, but even then, I think Valve has wanted to move more and more to community curation for years with a large part of it being because Steam is simply getting too big to manage effectively with how relatively small they are and because they don't want to be gatekeepers deciding who can and can't put their stuff on Steam. They may not be there with games yet, but there's more than enough community rating and commentary features to root out the scammers and the shoddy mods right now making it extremely easy for those not willing to blindly spend a few bucks trying a mod to stay informed and spend their money wisely.
This is one of the most self-defeating aspects of the entire experiment. The community cannot police for quality control unless they buy the mod first, and they can only receive a refund to their Steam Wallet, meaning Valve gets their cut for your participation, no matter what. The community has to pay in order to be allowed to curate and control content. The same goes for modders wanting to make sure that they work is not being pirated - that's the part really mortifying the top modders, causing them to take down their content even from the Nexus, for fear that others are going to profit from it.

This entire thing just doesn't work and it's not worth trying to fix it when it obstructs what makes the community even viable to begin with.