Regarding the discussion a few pages back about a "good mods" catalogue, being an OCD with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), I would love to see one definitive list or database myself. However, I do not think it will ever possible to create a definite list without including every single mod ever created, and then we are back to square one because you will have to test each mod yourself.
Everyone has different standards as to what a good mod is. A lot of people don't even have experience driving any of these cars on track for real and only go based on numbers (which we know doesn't translate 1:1 to AC physics engine in many cases). Also even if there are good mods people might not want to share them freely (e.g. private fb groups, paid only mods, private commissions, etc). And even if it's a good AND free mod, there's some who just simply do not care about particular cars/tracks. Heck I don't even use Sol and people will say it's the best mod for AC out there
Generally the modding community nowadays are also quite different from the heydays of ISImotor. Now I feel people are a lot more opinionated, there are lots of "cliques" with members only exclusive stuff, not to mention copyright strikes. The younger generation also prefer quantity more over quality. It's real messy. I only started dabbling in mods in rFactor around 2014 so I missed the golden years, but by that point all the bad mods were already forgotten and only the good mods stay up. Even then the best database website (rfactorcentral) has gone kaput and I have to hunt on various sites to get all the things I want. In the end I gave up on cars and just focused on collecting tracks from tt.servegame (which is still up until today amazingly). My rF1 install now has almost 600 tracks from around the world, but only 10 or so cars
Now 10 years from now someone might collate something similar with AC, but I doubt it because there are a lot more sim options on the table and you know people will move on immediately to the next one when it comes out. I mean even RD might not survive that long (I hope not, but you never know with anything on the internet). The only sim with good consolidated database that I know is GPL with gpltd, but that game was a lot smaller in scope than AC so you can't really compare.
With AC I started following this thread around 2016, but pace was still slow back then. 2017 things started to pick up and 2018 was when this thread started ballooning like crazy. On average it takes me 2 hours per week to scour through all the new stuff here, another hour to unpack everything (checking for duplicate mods etc), and another hour to test cars & tracks. And by test I mean only drive one lap for each car and track
If I have a good feeling, I keep it. If not, delete. But with the pace of stuff coming out I end up never ever driving any of these cars again. My AC cars folder now has 1000 files, and the track folder 170 ish, but you can say I might as well only have 10 cars and tracks because the rest I never use anyway, so what's the point of all that? I still love cars though and the fun I get is from discovering and testing cars. If from the start I was given a database of 1000 good mods, I would probably end up not driving any of them because it would be too overwhelming. So even though I have spent an inordinate amount of time testing and culling mods, and sometimes I wish things are easier, the alternative is I would probably not have driven anything
So you see, I think that with modding the journey is more important than the destination. Nobody can collect all mods, or even all "good" mods because such a thing don't exist. Best advice I can give newcomers is to just watch this thread, watch RD, bookmark good modding sites and authors that you like and take it from there. Just take each day as a surprise and don't go chasing to have the "complete" list. The joy is from driving the cars, not having 10TB of unused files and pixels on your HDD
👍