I've made a few small Modules with Electron, but I basically just stay with Aurora.
I never found the NWN2 Toolset to be impossibly dreadful, it did more or less what the NWN1 Toolset does; it's just a damn sight more time consuming to do the same things in NWN2. The one thing that keeps me going back to it occasionally is the exterior areas where you can play with terrain so freely and which, for me, is the simplest, quickest, easiest element in Electron. Interior "Tilesets" in NWN2 are sometimes hellishly frustrating to work with.
However, I have long suspected that the reason I find the NWN2 Toolset so arduous to work with at times is that when I met it, I was years-used to NWN1 - and it's similar enough to Aurora that you find yourself trying to do the same things in the same ways you do for NWN1 only they're not quite the same and thus you and the Toolset confuse each other and call each other names. Perhaps this is why I find the exterior area building so easy - it's totally different to NWN1 and so I have no preconceptions attached to it.
And, obviously, the more you mess around with it, the more used to it you get...
I imagine someone coming to NWN2's Toolset without having ever tried any such thing before would find it considerably "simpler" than old hands bringing knowledge of a similar yet different Toolset with them and expecting parity that doesn't always exist.
All of which is completely and utterly off the topic.
The simple answer of "there is no one magic button to press to make NWN1 look different" might perhaps be one worth looking at for those who have in the past expressed concerns over the dwindling NWN Community.
Many are the resources for people in the Community who know what they're doing to find stuff, identify file sources, etc... but what does the community offer by means of a doorway to the outside? A simple door, I mean, not just the promise of great treasures lost in fabled ruins deep in an impenetrable jungle of modding...
Maybe those concerned should create a little resource somewhere for complete newcomers to be able to quickly and easily review all the available "basic" mods for NWN. Simple stuff like texture overrides, etc, for people who just want to try playing the game and who aren't instantly planning to dive into modding it, making stuff in the Toolset or start messing about with obscure scripts, freakish custom models or whatever.
I imagine creating a coherent list of even just "the simple, cosmetic stuff" with appropriate links, would be a moderately time-consuming venture - it's just a thought.
But maybe, as I say, for those concerned about dwindling numbers in the Community, the provision of such resources, a kind of "starting ground" for complete strangers, so to speak, might lure some new blood into the deeper world of the Toolset and the wonders of giving up on looking for games you might want to play and just making your own instead.
Some of my worlds in Demoness Tales are all but unrecognizable as NWN these days, and the only "door" I ever had was buying the game because the edition with expansions I got had a shiny metallic box with Aribeth on it and she looked cute (and then finding it had something called a Toolset which sounded faintly intriguing)... But I couldn't have achieved the things I have without working damned hard at figuring out how to do it over several years, and occasionally being told the patently obvious by the skilled ancients of the community who already figured it out before me... And there's still so much more yet to learn...
But perhaps today, the Community, which I also found by accident, needs a new "door"...
(Apologies again for these hopelessly wandering Shabby Hyena diatribes).
