Yes, MGE is required. Also, make sure that the internal MWSE in MGE is not disabled.
GOTY is fine, it works exactly the same as MW + Tribunal + Bloodmoon in terms of mod compatibility.
MGE is running & the internal MWSE is _not_ disabled. And, before I decided just to reinstall everything (since this is my first time playing it & I was getting misc. errors on startup), I had also downloaded & installed the latest full version of MWSE to see if that would help ... it did not.
I was wondering if the patch level made a difference, because the GOTY version comes with the latest patches incorporated.
For what it's worth, I can enter the commands to change the time format from 24-hour to 12-hour and back in the console without getting any errors, but the time is not displayed on the game screen.
Is there by any chance some setting that needs to be enabled in MGE to get it to work it?