I don't fully agree that the modding scene has taken a hit. Skywind, Skyblivion and beyond skyrim are going to be some of the biggest total conversion mods in history. We'll see whether or not Microsoft will continue to allow OpenMW to progress in reverse engineering the entire construction set and engine.
I think that Larian has nothing to lose in proving all the tools they can provide without infringing upon someone elses IP.
It'll be interesting to see how far they'll get (or have got, for that matter). I'm aware of several attempts to do this already but they tend to either end up being shut down because the lawyers get trigger-happy or the scope is simply way too ambitious to ever fully realise. btdt, even on a very much smaller scale...
I am aware of one total conversion for Oblivion whose name I forget offhand, largely as I never quite got around to playing it, but that was all original content and an awful lot of it. It was quite highly rated as I recall.
The main problem I have ascertaining how active a modding scene is comes down to everything being completely spammed to death by endless reshade packages; it can be quite hard to factor them out of the equation in order to see how many actual mods exist. It used to be bad retexes that were the problem but the plague of reshades is much worse!
