Just an idea that I thought of today, without having any real idea of how shaders are designed or what they're truly capable of Is it possible to set up a shader, like the existing DoF shader, to only activate when you have a menu open? It seems like it would be a fairly simple thing to do, and it would make the conversations feel more personal and isolated from the rest of the world, like the character and NPC are the only things that matter.

EDIT: I ask because I don't really like using DoF in general, as having 9/10 of the screen faded out never felt conducive to a good gameplay experience, but I can see the benefit in some cases.

I think it is possible. Why not? The catch is if there is a script that can understand "in dialog". Another thing, menu mode is disabling shaders. So our shader must activate before going into dialog. There was an Oblivion style dialog mod, iirc. I think this can go nice with it.

I had a few menu-mode shaders a while back, not sure why they got to. With the new flags, it'll be a lot easier to make, though. Dialogue DoF looks great, though, The Witcher used it and it looked awesome.

I also have a new DoF in the works (translation to MW), so you may want to check that out when it's ready.