Thanks for the respectful replies. My comment was borne out of frustration that a big part of many high-end AAA titles these days is to do research on mods and how best to modify your game experience to overcome any deficiencies. And of course you can't get too far down that road before dealing with potential incompatabilities. I just hate the whole process.
Note that my original comment was railing against "dev-supported modding tools", not all modding in general. The examples of the games listed above that were modded without any dev-supported tools is actually what I would like to see more of. By raising the bar a bit to allow changes to your games, a couple things happen that I think are good. For one thing, it means that people will need to be that much more motivated to take on that challenge. Let's face it, 99% of the mods that are made for these games is crap. If there's a real issue with a game that I want to fix through modding, I shouldn't have to find a fix by wading through thousands of amateur wannabe game designers who all have designed a new game-breaking sword or suit of armor.
The other thing that happens is that devs can't fall into the trap of thinking, "Well, if they don't like the decision we made on this game mechanic, they can always mod it to be different." That's a trap that I think is easy to fall into, and I would rather have the professional game designers make the tough decisions, which may in turn foster some hard looks at other aspects of the game to make that decision work better. At the very least, if it's that hard to figure out what works best, then maybe that's a sign that a user-controlled option should be made available in the Options menu so the user doesn't have to jump through hoops to make his game more enjoyable.
Despite my tone here, I really don't feel that strongly about this, I really don't. This is more to generate some discussion. My first thought on seeing this newsbit is that it would likely guarantee that we'll see several magazine articles titled, "The top-10 indispensible mods for Skyrim." And the cynic in me quickly jumps to the next thought that it sure would be nice if these "indispensible mods" could somehow make it into the original game!
I know people like modding games, and I readily admit that real improvements have been made through the process. But it's just so tedious to take advantage of those improvements. Maybe as a compromise, a game developer could solicition applications from the modding community to participate in a closed Beta that includes access to the development kit, and dangle the carrot that the development team will vote on the top 10 mods and include them in the game. Part of the application process could include past mods you've made for other games.
Hell, I don't know. Sorry if folks are upset at my proposed solution of doing away with dev-supported modding tools. Rather than focus on the drawbacks of my solution (which I readily admit to), are there folks at least willing to acknowledge the underlying problem of the frustrating end-user experience of modding your game to make a crucial improvement while thinking, "I really wish the devs had taken care of this!"