I managed to get working what I had wanted and made a guide about it on Steam called:: Revert to pre-deployment stage. Version I was looking for was e1.6.5. I was making some pretty big mistakes at first, it had been many years since I had downloaded the depo for a game, but it all worked out in the end.
I'm not sure what the rules are here about linking outside the forums so I'm not going to link to the guide. I was also able to get about 90% of the mods I was looking for, some were archived and I couldn't find a github release of it. All in all I'm quite pleased.