Why don't Categories work automatically in MO2 (or MO1 for that matter)?

[yonkiman]

I'm using MO2 for the first time, and (as with MO1), every mod I download from Nexus has an incorrect (or if I'm lucky, missing) Category entry.  There's some discussion about this here that resulted in a Managing Categories entry on the Mod Organizer Guide.  However I've read it a few times and still haven't figured out how to map things properly, so I just manually change the category of each mod as I add them.

 

So my (probably naive) question is: Why doesn't MO (1 or 2) automatically work with Nexus Categories?  It seems like ~95% of the mods people use with MO come from Nexus, so why does every single MO user need to edit the mapping or manually change each mod's category after downloading.

 

Not complaining - just genuinely curious. 

[Freso]

Because Mod Organizer's (1 & 2 both) current internal setup only supports "knowing" one category id (the numbers used on Nexus to identify the categories) to category names (the textual representation that you read) mapping at a time… or something like that. The issue is mentioned in a comment on an issue in GitHub—I'm sure it's also been reported on its own, but I can't find it currently. This issue for MO1 comes close at least and has some links for instructions on how to "fix" it.

[Greg]

Nexus also has different categories for all of the games so there really isn't one set of categories that can be used across the board. Gameplay Effects and Changes is 24 for Skyrim and 71 for Fallout 3.

 

I also think Nexus categories are very poorly defined and completely disorganized. I mean armor and weapon retexture mods scattered across armor, miscellaneous, models and textures, visual and graphics, and weapons doesn't make any sense and it makes mods harder to find. I know this is just my personal opinion, but I tossed Nexus categories in the trash long ago. I really don't understand the difference between models & textures and visuals & graphics anyway. Both are basically mesh and/or texture changes.