It came into my mind that with the new engine for Skyrim Bethesda will most likely drop the nif 3D model format, too. This means that there won't be any fancy new mods for Skyrim right after the release unless they releases the exporter.

The reason why they will probably drop the format is because nif (NetImmerse File Format) was part of the Gamebyro engine (it's old name was NetImmerse Engine). So they would need to license it in order to use it.

For Morrowind they released the exporter but modding was very limited. Only people owning 3ds max could create models, and only a handful nif editor applications existed like texture path renamers.
For Oblivion they didn't released the exporter because it contained codes belonging to Havok. Luckily there were other Gamebyro games like Civilization III where the exporter was released so we could use that for some degree. But thanks to the NifTools team's reverse engineering work and the great tools they created it became possible to create and modify models for Oblivion by anybody.

So I fear there will be a huge reverse engineering and tool creation work again unless Bethesda decides to release the exporter. In my opinion the chances for the later is slim...

I wouldn't say that I'm tremendously familiar with the 3d modelling-to-ES engine process, as I've only gotten my hands on 3ds max a few weeks ago. But, considering that all the designers at Bethesda would be using the one modelling application (3ds max), and they are writing this engine in-house, there's no reason that Bethesda couldn't have integrated some kind of support for 3ds models directly into the engine (or is there? I don't know). Also there would be fewer hurdles for them to jump in order to produce an exporter, if one was required (no licensing fees?).

I have already asked this question here: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1148640-new-engine-no-mods/page__st__20

Read from page two to five.

Modding need not be crippled or even slowed by the lack of access to the 3D modeling process. There have been plenty of excellent mods released over the last 4 years by people who were clueless when it came to 3D modeling (myself included). Sometimes they didn't even use 3rd party resources. A lot can be done with just the CS and what's provided by the game itself.

Of course, I totally agree with that. I was only talking about new models not modding in general. Sorry if it was ambiguous.