I'm not crazy about the combat/leveling in Skyrim. So I'm particularly interested in changes to those aspects. I like the idea of enemies not scaling to my level.

I was looking at the Nexus Collections and the "Immersive" ones look pretty good like "Immersive & Epic Realms Of Nirn"
https://next.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/collections/rvxts8

But I'm not sure they do anything to change leveling.

I also saw a list called "Do not Go Gentle" https://github.com/Arkay-1248/Do-Not-Go-Gentle which uses Requiem and might be good for leveling though maybe doesn't have all the visual and quest mods of the Immersive ones.

Anyway I'd be interested in recommendations for curated mod lists like that.

I never had any luck with those mod lists personally. I tend to install a mod one at a time and go from there. As far as suggestions, I don't mess with the combat and leveling.. I mainly stick to cosmetic things.. like new locations, updated locations, clothing, armor, weapons... although I can recommend Ordinator. It makes the perk system actually useful and makes you think about the direction you want your character to go in. So unlike regular skyrim where you just blindly grab every perk just because you can, you can focus on actually useful magic or useful melee combat or good archery/light armor builds. I can't play skyrim without it anymore.

I might have to do it manually, but if I have the list I think I can follow its load order. But it will take a while so I'm trying to pick something good before spending too much time installing it all.

Been looking for info like this myself. Seems the GoG version is not nearly as supported when it comes to many mod lists. I got the itch to play and found Eldergleam, did a lot of work to get everything downloaded, only to find it only works with Steam Skyrim because of SKSE nonsense among other things.

The good mod collections for Skyrim only work with the superior Steam version, not the second-class different & inferior GOG version.

I have a list of mods preset for extraction including the list file(s), which is easy enough to share.

My modlist 4a includes:

Albeit Steam clearly has an advantage for having all the builds for Skyrim, since LE, to SE, to AE, and thus being superior in this case for better mod support, GOG is by no means that inferior.

Just to follow rtcvb32's post proving that GOG's version is on pair with Steam's for modding, albeit, again, some older mods will be lost to time, even on Steam modern versions, I will post my list:

(Link to temporary PasteBin like site)
https://go.0xfc.de/cotrqr

...therefore, yes you can, mod GOG's Skyrim. Unfortunately though, seldom players will have the patience to deal with the steps required to understand each modding environment and they will still complain about said environment.

I understand what you're saying. But please, GOG's Skyrim is in no way that far from Steam's anymore simply because modding community is also supporting GOG heavily, or at least the first GOG release. Old mods that are also broken on new Steam versions that are an exception.

# Edit:

To clarify and explain some mods that "are not working on the latest GOG version" present on my list working with, well, GOG latest version...

(This was made FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY, OBVIOUSLY. Do not contact me to send you the reverse engineered dlls. Wait for the official update from the mod owners at their Nexus page.)

Complete Cooking and Alchemy Overhaul and Race Menu are not updated yet as far as I know to the latest GOG version but I managed to make them work simply by editing their DLLs where the reader for the game version blocks higher versions than the one that is officially supported.

With Complete Cooking and Alchemy Overhaul, it works perfectly fine, as if no changes were made.
Simply because its just a number that changed from last version apparently?
I tested it for a while and its working fine, even with patches, as you can see in the mod list above.

In Race Menu's case, though, editing the region of the DLL which reads the version of the game completely breaks all other DLLs being read by Mod Organizer 2. I have no idea if this is caused by the way MO2 sandboxes mods installed or if Race Menu last update to the latest Steam's version changed other areas of the code to work specifically with Steam and those changes would also need to be applied to the latest GOG's Race Menu version.

I thought in trying to make the same with other mods that supposedly only work with Steam's latest version and some may even work well, as long as their DLL updates changes are only version checks.
This would require further testing, also could be used to restore old mods by community effort.

Thank you so much for the inspiration. I have recently downloaded the GOG anniversary version and was hoping I could just switch my mods over to a new instance in MO2 and it's been a nightmare. I'm trying to get just the basic patches and foundation running atm racemenu, skyui, true directional movement and the like. I'll do some more digging around and continue to work on it. I do lots of traveling and often do not have any ability to get on a network so having a modded version of skyrim that doesnt have a connection with me would really be a luxury.