I am not sure how helpful my input will be, but the best mod manager I have used is Mod Organizer 2 for Fallout 4 (among other Bethesda games). The mods themselves for that game come from Nexus, which has suffered its own problems in the past few years. But I contrast MO2 with Skyve, which purports to be a mod manager for City Skylines, and I found Skyve lacking somewhat. In MO2 I can arrange the mod load order to my satisfaction, but with Skyve I am not sure what is causing their load order. Skyve does indicate missing dependencies, as does MO2. I subscribed to a collection for City Skylines and to my dismay the mods were all jumbled together when I viewed them in Skyve. Hundreds of them, not counting a few dependencies. The mods on the Workshop for City Skylines are not sorted in any way, while the assets are incredibly tightly sorted. If you look at the mods published by one author on the Workshop, it indicates that you are not subscribed to any of those mods, when in fact you may be (as I was). In desperation I went looking for another city builder, any city builder, tried my old copy of Cities XXL, and then saw that SimCities 4 Deluxe had gone on sale for about $2 on Steam. I checked my archives and saw that I still had my SimCity 4 Plugins directory from 2003. I bought the new copy of the game, and copied the Plugins over to the Steam game directory. I am now playing my old saves. I am amazed. But this doesn't help your discussion, other than that I would be delighted if there was a tool to manage the SimCity 4 mods. I have mine sorted in directories by author, then by building, with the dependencies in the root of Plugins. I can at least locate them, which is better than I can with Steam's numerical coding for game and mod.
