I'm going to be ramping up the number of mods I use for Skyrim. I used Oblivion Mod Manager in the past and found the tool to be useful for what I needed. It helped me keep my Oblivion installation clean quite easily, simple method to rearrange load order and had some additional tools that were helpful, like syncing up your save game to the mods you had installed before. All that without being overly complicated in needing to know advanced modding stuff or having to install additional programs like Python.

At a quick glance I haven't seen anything similar for Skyrim, unless I overlooked it (which is possible). I'm looking for a relatively simple mod management program to primarily be able to use it to install mods from an archive format, be able to keep my Skyrim install clean, and be able to sort load order easily (like by drag and drop or click arrow button). I don't want anything advanced with more bells and whistles than I need or will use because I won't be doing much heavy duty mod creation of my own.

1) What does this community recommend? Pros + Cons for each?

I subscribed to a couple of mods from Steam Workshop and find that there is no obvious way to uninstall them. If I unsubscribe to the mod, it seems Steam Workshop and Skyrim's own Data Files manager only disables the ESP file without actually removing the contents of the mod.

2) Anyone have any tips on how to cleanly remove Steam Workshop mods? I hope I don't need 3rd party tools for that. I do consider myself and intermediate computer user, so don't hesitate to use some more advanced instructions if they are need to remove Steam Workshop subscribed mods.

1. There are three big choices for mod management, Nexus Mod Manager, Mod Organizer and Wrye Bash. NMM is the simplest to learn and use. However if there's any overlapping in assets, NMM isn't the most practical to manage them. Mod Organizer has the advantage that it doesn't (necessarily) install mods into the actual Data-folder, instead it uses profiles. Basically Mod Organizer keeps the game and mods separate. Wrye Bash gives the most control over mods and functions which are not available for any others. Most importantly Wrye Bash gives the ability to create Bashed Patch which becomes mandatory when more than one mod edits leveled lists for example.

My recommendation? Wrye Bash, exclusevily.

2. Since mods from Workshop are esp- and bsa-files only, getting rid of them should be very simple. Just delete them once unsubscribed.