Never went back to it because I didn't want to go through the exercise of maintaining it.

You shouldn't be actively trying to maintain it. Some mods and patchers like DynDoLOD will break if you change your load order during a playthrough.

Best practice is to get it set up and stick with it until you're ready to start a new game

What you're looking for is called "Wabbajack". It's a pretty impressive system, because it actually pulls all the mods from their official nexus mods source, rather than requiring you get permission from every mod you want to include to be compiled into some new package that then has to be maintained and updated whenever anything updates.

It's like setting up a full-blown, fully tweaked modlist in a single click. Really impressive solution to navigating a lot of the thorniness that would come from redistributing other people's work in a "traditional" modpack.

Honestly, I think that one thing that people don't appreciate about Linux is how much work has been done on a common license front (BSD/LGPL/GPL/MIT) to help unify work, and how much work has been done by packaging and testing people, the distro guys. Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos

some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc

it'd be a lot harder. That's kinda what the Skyrim modding world is like.

The Skyrim modding crowd has several sources of fragmentation, I think:

• Bethesda doesn't actually make money off mods at all, unless it's from the Creation Club and paid, of which there is not much. Skyrim is closed source, so they're the only people who can work on that. My guess is that some stuff, like Skyrim Script Extender, really should have been folded into the base game...but there's just not money in it for Bethesda, and they aren't a volunteer project. If you look at a favorite open source game of mine, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, there are surprisingly few mods...because over the years, things that would have been "mods" for a lot of commercial games were just added to the base game.

• Bethesda has been comparatively-restrictive on what content they'll host, so "just put a mod on Bethesda's site" isn't going to be a universal solution.

• NexusMods, probably the largest mod distribution site, is a company, and has no incentive to help facilitate other sources of mod distribution. So their mod managers only support automatic download of mods from NexusMods.

• Some mods are going to cause moral outrage or are even outright illegal in some places.

• Because many mods don't allow redistribution, they can't be moved to another site. That also limits the clients that can automatically handle them.

• Because mods generally are not under licenses that permit forking, people can't just go out and fix some of these compatibility problems and release a fork that works.

• Sometimes people take down mods. Maybe they don't want people to know that they were producing an erotic mod. Maybe they just get angry or frustrated and want to stop. Maybe they get in a fight with someone else. Maybe they're doing a political protest (I remember some users doing this when Russia invaded Ukraine). With FOSS software, that's not much of a problem, because the rest of the world can fork and continue development. That's often not the case with Skyrim mods.

And a lot of these problems affect modding of games other than Skyrim. It's just a particularly big problem because Skyrim is an extremely-heavily-modded game.

I'd like to see a cross-platform game-agnostic mod manager. Something that'd have enough scale that it could be maintained on an ongoing basis, past a single game's lifetime. Support non-interactive operation, conflict resolution (automatically disabling various sets of mods, restarting game, asking user if problem is gone), downloading from a variety of sites automatically. Downloading deltas efficiently, rather than whole archives, if a user has a recent version already. Then, if any game-specific support is required, just have a small extension to add that. That won't solve all the problems

the license problem on Skyrim mods is, I think, a big root cause

but at least it'd be a starting point.

Vortex mod manager doesn't, but you can still use the api key to attach another mod manager. In theory, the only one I've found that allows it won't actually download anything and doesn't explain why.