Hey all, first post. Not sure this is in the right spot.

Basically, downloaded Skyrim SE, since my other copy is Skyrim is in someone else's name... The game worked fine, but there were a few glitches, little things, so I went to a great deal of trouble, and eventually downloaded the unofficial Skyrim SE mod/patch. I ran some sort of program called LOOT, and couldn't make heads or tails of its user interface. I pushed buttons until it threw up a message that suggested it was working, and switched the game on. It all seemed to be working fine. A while later, I figured I'd load a mod on, it's a mod for rebuilding Winterhold, since it's always bugged me you can't, and the place was trashed eighty years ago... Anyway, I push some more buttons, get a whole lot of cryptic and obtuse messages from LOOT, but they seem to suggest it's doing something, so I flip the game back on. Nothing. The game works fine, but the mod contents aren't there. I wait for 144 hours ingame, nothing. The game is vanilla. I run LOOT again, push some more buttons, get some more non-answers from it, flip it back on. The mod doesn't work. I shrug, that's fine, it's a mod, made by a volunteer, won't work everytime, I'll just play without it.

After a while, I run into a bug that's supposedly fixed by the unofficial patch, and I realize the patch isn't going. There's an in-game mod menu, it has two mods listed, one's the unofficial patch, one's the winterhold rebuild. Both are listed, neither work in-game. Game otherwise works fine. Just recently, after another twenty hours playtime, the game has become somewhat unstable, might be hardware, might be save file or whatever... But anyway, how the hell do you get mods to work?? This SE thing and all the online rubbish it's linked with are extremely arcane, obtuse and unhelpful, and rarely seem to function. You have to do odd things just to get the product to work as advertised. What am I doing wrong?? I simply don't understand why you can't just drop a mod into the folder, select it and go, like with normal Skyrim. I used to write simple mods myself, and boot them straight up, then simply disable them when I was done testing. What's going on guys???

Any and all help appreciated.