So far, I haven't run across any evaluations of the new Skyrim CK. And although I'm strictly a user of the mods made by others, I'm never-the-less quite curious as to whether it's being viewed as an obvious improvement over Oblivion's CS.

There was that thread started by a Bethesda dev who asked what improvements/features mod makers would like to see in the new CK when it came out. Did any of the requests show up in the CK? Too early for a meaningful evaluation?

I would really appreciate hearing the thoughts of this forums mod makers who are still around or dropping in on occasion.

I've heard that its just as buggy as the one for oblivion, no surprise there.

Well I'd ask Arthmoor & Shade Me ... They even beta tested the new CK for Bethesda.

Yes I've heard that there are buggy aspects to it and that some of the issues people are having with making mods are more to do with the game engine and not just CK per se.

I also hear the new additional scripting system papyrus is more difficult to learn and therefore sets a more exclusionary vibe with scripting mods for the game.

There are some improvements over the Oblivion CS. One of the most useful being a built in batch editor, like what ShadeMe did with the CSE, only with even more options. Dropping things into the render window settles the item on the ground, which is huge, I used to get so pissed at having to drag something I placed halfway across a cell to actually go where I wanted it. You can actually see proper shadows within the CK so that placing shadow casting lights isn't a guessing game. Dialogue editing has a pretty nifty semi-graphical representation of a quest's dialogue setup. Makes for a much easier time of it once you get the hang of it.

Papyrus is a bit of a pain in the butt. Far more powerful in what it can do, and has some things previously only available via script extenders. Since it's much more like a real programming language, it takes some doing to grasp the concepts at play.

There are some dialogue windows you can't resize, which cuts off access to some of the features affected by it.

The worst of the worst though is the navmesh bug. Libraries could be written about how awful that is, but Bethesda has said it'll be fixed.

Stability is much better than the Oblivion CS, but it's still possible to bring down the house of cards. I crashed it 3 times today, but in all 3 cases, I had lots of stuff open and was probably pushing my luck.