Yes, currently that's the case. But I don't think this will be the case in the future. Warband was "easy" because it had a lot of documentation and tutorials from the community. And this was also the reason why we had hundreds of duplicate-like mods in Warband. No one was able to add something new unless they get their hands dirty - and if you weren't a technical person, that wasn't an option for you anyway. Warband's strange module language is also counter-intuitive for most people. C# is both good in terms of language resources and experience. Any person with OOP knowledge can adapt to that code easily, doesn't have to be expert on that or needed to have professional level experience. For Warband that wasn't the case. LISP like Python they used was strange and needed time to understand. Debugging was also a nightmare.Getting started with modding, on the other hand, is a lot harder in Bannerlord than it is in Warband.
I think after EA, Bannerlord community will create it's own guides/tutorials and such. Some people will provide template projects. We will have OSP's etc. So that more and more people will get their hands on modding.
Is it bad for modding? Yes, because you have to do x2 work to change something that you could change in seconds if TW wouldn't do it like in that way. But is it actually really deeply hardcoded? I don't think so. And since letter/OP is mentioning about Total Conversion mods, I don't think patching it piece by piece should be the solution anyway. They can hire all the interns in the world, this won't change the fact that TC/FC mods will be extremely annoying to work on with patching/extending Native. If they simply provide the "gameplay" modules as a project with open-source, any modder can built/compile his own from that and this would remove all the issues mentioned in the letter ( apart from documentation but that part is already clear).I mean, isn't it? Sure, it's not 100% impossible to edit (like everything stuck in the exe file), but it's... 95% impossible to edit instead. If you have to replicate and replace complete libraries in order to edit a few particular values, that's not exactly mod friendly.
What about the small modules then? For them, removing constants/internals would make life easier. So the combination of both solutions would increase the moddability of the game for sure. But that is up to TW anyway.
It does, yes. I mean technically, you also have a good module/mod system(compared to other games) where you can write your own `Native` run the game with that folder only and call it Full Conversion if you want.Technically, the game does support Full Conversion mods in a certain manner.
But as far as I can see, game doesn't want you to "patch" Native piece by piece so that it will be a Full Conversion - this is not only too much work but also kinda exploiting the logic behind modules. Changing Native from source and building your own Native should be way easier than this approach. But again, that's just my opinion.