This is pretty long response lol so I'll tackle each point individually.

Plenty of niche games have “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on...

Your whole argument on niche games getting good reviews, I actually fully agree with. The problem is that those reviews are literally the only metric we have to discern whether or not the people that played it enjoyed it - anything else is pure speculation. Including your point about people not liking it if they felt it didn't feel enough like Skyrim, or people saying they like it just to appease others. It's frankly bizarre that you'd make an argument for Steam Reviews not 100% showing the accuracy of people's opinions, while simultaneously making statements like those with zero anything to back them up.

At the very least the reviews tell us that people who played it say they liked it. That's just a fact. And considering that that's all we have, I think it's fair to use it. Anything else, again, is just pure speculation.

I know it can be hard to keep reading after you see something that MAKES YOU SO ANGRY but you should try.

This was weird lol.

“7x the amount of mods that Morrowind has”. First, that ignores how many quests and mods were lost to time.

No, it doesn't. Skyrim has over 70k mods while Morrowind has roughly 11k. Even if there were over one hundred missing quest mods for Morrowind, which I doubt, it still wouldn't affect that massive difference.

But also? of course it has more mods. The same way that basically every new game in a franchise SHOULD sell more than the previous one did. The audience for gaming has exploded over the decades.

This... just isn't how modding works. Most new games releasing will have some reshades and a trainer, max. Once in a great while you'll get some nudity. The size of the audience doesn't change that - most games releasing simply don't garner much mod support.

By your logic a game like Call of Duty should have a massive modding scene, as the new entry will be newer and have a massive audience, an audience multiple times bigger than any Bethesda game. But no, that's just not how that works. Hell, even a game like The Witcher 3 only has half the number of mods that Morrowind does.

Also I'm confused as to the point of those links. Are you arguing that gaming has... gotten more popular over the years? Yeah no shit. As I said earlier, numbers going up doesn't magically guarantee a thriving modding scene.

So if we assume roughly the same market share were playing TES games in both eras (and it is pretty safe to say that Skyrim is a MUCH more mainstream game than Morrowind was…), we would expect at least a 3.5x increase in the amount of mods.

As I went over before, no. Lol absolutely not. I don't believe that you actually think this could possibly be true. Lets apply your logic to other mainstream games releasing nowadays and see if that logic holds water (hint, it doesn't).

This comment was truly a trip, thank you.