For a long time I kept playing a few games that have quite a few mods, for example Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3 , Jagged Alliance 2, and Baldur's Gate 2 and the mods definitely make all the games a lot better, but the easiest install of mods and the most user friendly is from the Baldur's Gate community. A few years ago a guy called Leonardo Watson made a wonderful install called Big World Project.

Since the BG2 modding community is quite big and active there were a lot of debates and in the end in these days the installer is in version 9.2, it's fully automatic, and its made in a way that pleases both modders and players, and I think if that model would be adopted by the oblivion community it would be a huge step forward. Here is a link to the main http://www.shsforums.net/topic/44661-big-world-project-bwp-v90/.

The way thats organized in short is that there is a user interface called Big World Setup that lets you choose the mods that you want, the type of install, with a minimum of recommended mods or a selection of mods that make the game more challenging, and after the choices are made, the BWS downloads the mods from the official modders pages. After the download is finished the BWS unpacks automatically all the mods in the correct folders and after a check it closes and opens the Big World Install. This one installs correctly all the mods in the right order automatically and after a few hours you have a fully functional modded BG2. Its very nice and VERY user friendly, and it helped the community grow a lot since it was developed, both modders and players.

I am curious if anybody would like to initiate such a successful project here, inspired by such a model.

Why? We've got OBMM and now BAIN which do everything perfectly adequately, except download it automatically for you. Which I certainly wouldn't want

Indeed, BAIN is perfect. Or... getting there, anyway.

If OBMM was more like FOMM, it'd be a whole lot better. As it is, well, it's OK. But there are so many cases where it's nowhere near ideal. That's where BAIN steps in.

There are 20 000 mods for oblivion just on tes nexus. How on earth would you manage to keep a program like that updated.

As others have pointed out we already have Oblivion mod manager (OBMM) and wrye bash. Mods packaged with OBMM already have scripts attached that automate install and let you choose between different install options with pictures and everything. Of course it is up to mod creator to add these scripts. The idea itself is fine, and there already are small compilation packs out there but yeah unless you do it yourself i would not expect anything like this.

What would be a little more realistic would be to create something ala Curse client used with wow, that lets you browse the content of there webpage within an application and let you download and install with the same button. It's a lot of work for little benefit though and all mods would have to be repackaged by there creators, something that is not likely to happen at this point in oblviion modding. For most of us browsing a web page for mods is no harder then browsing said web page in an app.

It could be a cool thing to start in preparation for next elder scrolls though, but it would basically be down to someone like tes nexus to do, since you need a server hosting the mods, not just the application. If darkone that runs tes nexus got someone to make said app for his site it could be a hit.

One thing that is going to complicate things is how mods in oblivion make changes to the same stuff though, this is why we need stuff like bashed patches. Mods for games like wow and so on never affect the same files. You only ever have one mod that changes one thing. So yeah i don't really think its viable, you will still need to get a basic understanding of what you are installing to get a working game.