With the DLC, I'm talking about just trying to buy them. It was a huge drawn out hassle to get it to work. That was the main source of my frustration. Like you said, GFWL doesn't really do much, and I disliked having to have it installed if it does nothing but cause frustration on occasion. Steam activation is a trivial issue, and I much prefer the auto updates and the ability to download it any time-it actually offers a reason I might want it.

How can you say that?

With moddability of Oblivion and F3 being so easy there is NO reason why you wouldn't be interested in mods.

There are so many that there is something for everyone.

From nude characters for an underage kiddie
to unofficial patches and massive fixes which rebalance the game, fix bethesda's mistakes, remove stupid design decisions (like oblivion's everyone levels up together with you giving you a random thug wanting 100 coins from you while wearing an armour worth 100K coins)
Mods give you
new quests
new models
graphical enachments
models, houses, weapons, UI tweaks...

How can you have zero interest in mods?

Gfwl has auto updates and if you buy the game from their Games on Demand service you can download it at any time.

Yeah, but MS Points? Really Microsoft?

Fair enough, I haven't used it in a long time. Like I said, my real frustration here is not based around that specifically, but rather the trouble I had with the DLC. To date, I haven't had any issues with Steam, and I never feel like I'm jumping through hoops to get features to work.

Do you know of any tool that gives the user the option to turn off or on specific mods that have been installed, or do they all have to be installed individually?

Steam Wallet? Really Valve?
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/fallout_new_vegas/post289

MS Points are annoying, but it beats giving Live your credit card info. They have basically no return policy.

Yes, the stupid MS Points system is annoying, but I will take it over DRM any day.

As for auto-updates, I actually dislike them. A lot of times a patch does something I don't like, or causes new technical issues. You can't reinstall an older version on Steam, it forces you to use the latest one no matter what. Fallout 3's 1.5 patch broke mods and caused crashes for a lot of people, if they do that again with New Vegas there is no roll-back option.

Nobody says you need to use it. But with GFWL you *have* to buy points in awkward denominations.

It's like any other steam game. It means that the steam client has to be running to play the game. The bottom line is it depends how reliable is steam offline mode.

Easy, I don't. If I wanted to play another game I would. I know what I am buying and I buy it,. There are 12s of games I buy every year and I am not willing to spend more time installing mods and trying to fix any games that I consider broken with mods and fan patches, There are too many games to waste my time on one, Life is too short.

In the last 10 years I have used only one mod and that for a couple of hours before I deleted it and continued to play the game without it. A flash light mod for Doom 3.

I have at least 80 games that I own that I haven't played yet, Mods? No thank you,

People who complain to developers about mods are the same type of people (for me) who complain about lack of more extensive online capabilities of games, and we end up with half arsed games with boring or unfinished single player games because the developers know or believe that some suckers will fix or mod the games for them,
Screw modifications.

Mods are also a giant crapshoot. Often times you can get good reliable mods such as the widescreen stuff for the IE games but the majority of mods are crap, (half arsed, half finished, disappointing, sloppy etc) and take a lot of sifting to find the few good ones. I pretty much never use mods, the IE ones are the exception

Actually, on FNV mod I DO want is a pipboy mp3 player, it's only been a few hours and I'm already sick of the 2 starting radio stations

That's what playing music on an mp3 player in the background is for. Unless NV is one of those games that gets pissed when you alt tab.

I'm a big fan of tweaks, not mods. I like stuff like widescreen hacks, removing or adding graphical effects, UI or HUD changes, enhancing textures, that kind of stuff. I pretty much never like or use mods that add story content or items, or one that change game mechanics. As you say, usually they are sloppy or amateurish, and almost all the time they mess with how the game was meant to be played (or the lore, in the case of RPGs).

There are exceptions of course.