Sforzinda’s armor and clothing mashup mods are always my first answer to this question, because they are so good. The Nexus has supporting patches, like bodyslide conversions and compatibility tweaks.

My second answer is always high-poly-head, which is a SFW mod on a very NSFW site. But it’s such a good visual upgrade!

Oooooh, interesting point. I need to take a closer look at what AI Overhaul does!

Grimacing with pain… I’m going to say that for the purposes of this question, I’m going to skip all the bugfix mods and the staples-of-everything mods like SKSE and SkyUI. I’m also going to skip the enabling mods like OAR and Base Object Swapper, because so much is built on top of them now that they’re requirements.

When I mod Skyrim, once I have the base layer in place, what do I always include even though I don’t need it?

True Directional Movement. This is so good that for me it’s now a base mod. I love that third person mode both feels good and looks good.

High-Poly Head and NPC makeovers using it. Hard to un-see the clonk in the old heads once you see the nicer ones.

QuickLoot. Massive QOL improver.

Any mod that adds cloaks.

ENB Lights. They make the game so pretty.

My only complaint about the SPID version of Wet & Cold is that the author also chose to rip out all the AI features, where NPCs come in out of the rain. I recently tried to recreate the full W&C experience with a collection of smaller mods, and I couldn’t find anything to recreate that behavior. It’s the kind of thing that will make me figure out how to write AI packages some day.