Just a general curiosity, right now, but is extracting your .bsa files a good idea, or a bad idea? Back on Oblivion, I always had them extracted and never seemed to have any issues; but with Skyrim, it "seems" like my load times increase with them extracted?

Reading around, I've seen a few mixed views: some saying it should actually speed up the loading, although only a minor amount; and others saying it actually impacted performance, although for them they said it was stuttering during gameplay, not their actual load times...

So, anyone have any thoughts on this?

The general rule i think is you get longer loading times. It depends on your hardware though.

extracting your BSA also means that you will lose the bsa load order (loose files always win over bsa), which can lead to issues in some cases

The directory thrashing associated with loose files increases your load times faster than the processing needed to read a bsa, as far as I've heard.