While I am not a modder, I am an admin on four heavily modded servers. Each server has 30+ mods. The vanilla game in my opinion is boring without the use of mods.
Unfortunately, not even the hard work of the mod authors is enough to overcome my frustration with Funcom. It is bad enough when a server and players have downtime when mod authors needs to update mods, but when you cannot even play the base game then it borders on insane.