I'll give you my two cents.
When EA started, I was super excited for the game and started a small mod with some tweaks that I hoped would grow to eventually be a big Vanila+ kind of mod.
But after fighting with many breaking patches and,.most importantly, the time investment it took to decompile DLLs and parse through TW code to reverse engineer their stuff and then have to manually test my changes... It just became too much. Something like 60 to 70 percent of my steam game time was just debugging stuff and it burned me out.
e1.5 was the nail on the coffin for me. I got disillusioned with the game's progress and decided I'll come back to the game when it comes off of EA.
Now EA is, I guess technically, over but the vanilla game has still left a bad taste.
I want to wait another year or so to see what TW does with this game and see if it is worth coming back.
Having said all that, I genuinely thank the existing modders for creating some quite deep mods. Whenever I do decide to come back, it will be so much easier, to drink from their fountain, and hit the ground running.