Oh also I happened to try out this list called 'Lorerim', which is a huge modlist that has a 200GB download size and around 420GB install size. Insane.
What's even more insane is how utterly fucking shit this list is.
For starters the performance is dogshit, I was getting 35 FPS at the Riverwood standing stones area and I have a monster rig. Christ knows what its like elsewhere.
This kind of performance wouldn't be such a surprise if the list's visuals were good, but they aren't. The approach here is akin to 'shove everything you can find on the Nexus into the world space and hope it looks good'. It doesn't.
Areas are full of odd-looking structures that either don't make sense in the locations they are placed, or just look ugly as hell. Towns are barely recognisable anymore, which again wouldn't be an issue if they were improved, but they just lost all their character and the resulting visuals end up a mush of colours and shades with no definition anywhere.
Characters aren't better, having this weird uncanny valley effect and dead eyes, and their lip-sync looks horrible, much worse than default.
Combat is also this really weird combination of Requiem combined with a lot of action game mods like combat stances and it just doesn't work IMO, although this is more of a question of taste I guess. Enemy floating heath bars also doesn't suit Skyrim IMO. Walking past Aela's intro scene, I took a moment to deliver the finishing blow to the giant whereupon he fucking launched into the air like a cruise missile.
The list also has some technical issues, at least on my rig, whenever I zoomed out from 1st to 3rd person, I could briefly see my character's skeleton and eyeballs, which was freaky. Also, a new idle animation where the character stretches their arms, resulted in the 1st person view seeing inside the arm mesh.
Lastly and this is just the icing on the cake, I teleported into Whiterun and while marvelling at the truly awful aesthetics on display, this fucking insane-looking NPC comes barrelling towards me with the weirdest walk animation I have ever seen, flinging his arms from side to side and his legs looking like something out of a Monty Python sketch. I assume this was a broken animation... But it was just hilarious coming after all the other jank I'd just experienced.
Truly, Skyrim modding has achieved new levels of retardation.