cdcooley

You can ignore the conflicts without any major issues. WICastMagic01 is fine. TIE makes the same basic tests as the USKP but in a different way. WICastMagic04 is missing one new test from UDBP but the TIE version has others that are even more important (and more likely to be triggered). WIAddItem03 is more of a problem. The USKP has added conditions on the Owner alias that should probably be merged into TIE, but TIE has important conditions on the quest itself. WEJS14 is another one where the two sets of changes really should be merged, but I don't think the bug being fixed by the USKP was a critical one. Maybe kryptopyr will make an update of TIE after the next round of unofficial patches get out of beta but the conflicts are small enough I haven't bothered updating my personal patch.

I don't think I would even have any of the DLC installed if I couldn't use this to get them started later than Bethesda's defaults. This, The Choice is Yours, and Thieves Guild Requirements are what inspired me to do my Not So Fast mods. I waited for a while hoping kryptopyr would do something for the main quest and College of Winterhold storyline but eventually decided to make some minimal changes to those for myself. (Then based on a posting in the Nexus Mod Request forum I finally packaged them up and released them.)

The only trigger for Season Unending is your dialogue with Balgruuf about trapping the dragon, so if you bypass that opportunity it won't come again. That's why I would want to change the default if this were going to be core. Technically it's entirely optional and really is just a way to make sure the player has at least noticed there's a civil war in progress. I've always been slightly uncomfortable disabling it by default but since my mods are never popular I decided not to worry about the potential of denying a new player a chance to experience that quest.

Yes. A very interesting discussion you've got here. Does the author get a say? My vote would be not core. If it is going to be core I would want to make an updated release so that Season Unending negotiations aren't skipped by default. My logic in choosing the initial 7 day delay is that you need a little breathing room to gain a few levels and learn about the world before fighting your first dragon but not so much that things stall out completely. The second delay of 14 days is so that you actually have time to visit a few word walls, encounter a few random dragons, and get annoyed with the Greybeards' desire to take it slow. After you meet Delphine the storyline basically pulls you away from treking up to visit the Greybeards until you need to talk with Parthurnaax. But I've never been particularly tied to those values and other defaults might suit the majority of players better.