The system of packaging wholesale file replacements versus the stock code and merely copying it over top of whatever else the user's downloaded is just so disatisfactory. It's made a mess of the mod scene for the TES games, IMHO. Take Skyrim: people have hundreds of drop-in mods, and then if they're lucky, they drop in patches. I look at all the patches to make Requiem work with a zillion other things and it's not just tedious, it's still broken. My debugging logs are still full of issues. Mostly, the community is just putting bandaids on it.
I'm biased, of course. I wrote the Foundation Plugin system for Bridge Commander, a Trek game with Python 1.5.2 adapted into a scripting layer, and I worked hard to make an early de-facto standard for image/sound replacements, ship additions, bridge additions, music score additions, custom signaled events, and "monkey-patched" replacements of existing routines without overwriting entire files. The community came to support it, and rely on it. My satisfaction was seeing how few issues people had from merging huge amounts of content from different modders without having to write Python code themselves.
Why aren't we doing even better than this? Why not have source control and repositories like software engineers do? Why not update things the way people take for granted with Linux distros and "app stores" on other platforms?
Can of worms firmly opened.
