The past few years we've seen a lot of fancy new stuff like CSE2, the modloader and fancy ASM hacks but sometimes I kinda fear people just start looking that as 'the' way to mod and get overwhelmed by possible difficulties or complexities. As opposed to just making a nice, simple and small mod.
All depends on execution. I would love to see an experienced modder return to base vanilla and do something with the base game/engine and make an experience off of that. A lot of people just want to use the engine as a canvas to paint their own ideas with little regard for the original characters, story, and context of the actual game.
Seeing the return to mods that have that same flavour as Schism, Path of Ruin, and Super Street Nito's Journey to become Asian 4 EX Turbo Edition would be a really nice thing.
I think the argument that "It's too much for beginners", isn't really relevant in any manner. There's great tutorials for getting into both, and modding is the easy form of gamedev already, it's not really that much overhead, and most hacks are just modules-
you plug into the base game anyway with it all being plug and play with little to no overhead. It's when you crawl into things like <VAR, <BKG and <CNV do things get complex in any manner.