It's right up my alley. I like to live sort of a second life in Skyrim with some of my characters. Roleplay. :)

That is pretty meaningless with a TES game since its strength is its moddability, not how it is out of the box.

Well, sorta. If you're on a console, mods are useless to you, and there are plenty of people who play with few to no mods whatsoever. Any game or DLC has to be evaluated on its own content as well as its mod potential. In recent times Bethesda seems to have taken the "it doesn't matter if our release is half-assed, modders will fix it" approach, which I greatly and vehemently disagree with. It should not be the community's burden to make the content good, because Bethesda is selling a GAME, not an engine. So while adding modding opportunities is a great thing, the content itself needs to be worthwhile as well. Hearthfire seems to be designed to appeal to a broader audience than the base game, rather than being good on its own account.

Not at all. I'd say it's specifically designed with consoles in mind just because they don't have access to the numerous housing mods.

Given that it's been out for a month or so on XBox 360... I'd have to say "yes".

Considering that I am not happy with any of the current housing mods, I'm hoping that his will shake up the modding scene a bit.

That's fine. Far be it from me to tell you how to have fun with Skyrim, and if you like the Hearthfire DLC, then good for you.

I'm just wondering how well it will sell, because it'd be interesting to see what proportion of players want to be able to do this kind of thing.

Personally, when it comes to housing, I don't really care how it looks. I just want it to have a bed, a lot of storage space and be conveniently close to merchants and crafting stations.
All of which were already satisfied with the vanilla houses in the game, so I didn't even look into housing mods.

That point was about appealing to the Sims crowd rather than making a meaningful addition to the game. It's obviously designed with consoles in mind, but it seems to be a rather disappointing addition in general.

On the bethsoft forums.. people really wanted Adoptable children.. People also wanted to build there own house.. But that section of the mod is totally a console port..

Isn't one of the selling points of the Elder Scroll games how much freedom you have? A lot of people apparently wanted to be able to do this, and now they can. Why is that not a meaningful addition to the game?

Oh what a surprise... it's regionally restricted despite the base game and other DLC being available here. Considering Beth JP haven't restricted anything for a while now, I'd love to know why someone restricted this...

Maybe the Hearthfire houses are not earthquake-ready?

Then it would be regionally restricted in the US too...

True about consoles and you have a point about Bethesda getting more lazy. Thankfully Bethesda still makes satisfyingly enough games in vanilla but they have to start to watch it with the next game in the series.

I think it'll sell well. Finally consoles have a taste of what PC users have and probably many future mods will have Hearthfire as a requirement. Sales on PC might not be that great at the start but like most Bethesda games, DLC and expansions they'll make up for it by selling reasonable well over a long time