I've been avoiding the script extenders, because I'm running Morrowind through Wine and glad it works as well as it does
But I may end up having to look into that... I did find a mod called magicka based skill progression that uses MWE, were you talking about examples using the extenders?
The skillbooks thing should work; the only annoyance there is that to allow full levelling, I'll need 95 books of possibly 4 skills, since I know of no way to reuse a skillbook. I expect I can autogenerate the script, I just need to define the books
I was also looking at temporarily setting the experience gained from repairing armor/weapons high enough to gain a full level of experience, but it doesn't look like we can access
that from the scripts, either!