What game companies have the best modding communities?

NO! Cervantes, I am sorry to inform you that you are STILL wrong. At least, partially wrong.

In regards to technological achievements in game engine design, Morrowind is NOT on the same level as Oblivion. I repeat, NOT. Even when you compare it to technologically revolutionary games from that same era like Trespasser and Black & White (both of which came out before Morrowind), Morrowind still falls very short of hitting that benchmark. It is true that it was one of the earliest truly open world 3D games, and in fact might have been the very first truly 3D open world first-person game (unlike Daggerfall which used 2D sprites for nearly everything), which is a triumph in and of itself. And it is true that Morrowind had extremely impressive graphics for a first person game of its time (described as a "resource pig" by 2002 standards). And having played it the graphics/textures still look surprisingly ok to this day, despite the sometimes extremely limited animations.

But that's where the technological achievements end, because the sad fact is that Morrowind has some of the most primitive AI of any 3D game I've ever played, practically nothing in the way of flora (i.e. trees, forests, grass, etc.), and absolutely no physics to speak of or any extra bells and whistles like that. I get the feeling that Bethesda's main priority with Morrowind was just to translate the Daggerfall formula into a pretty-looking fully 3D game and not waste time experimenting with elaborate AI or physics or anything like that. It definitely wasn't an ambitious excursion in game design like other games from that era such as Trespasser, Balck & White, and Halo CE were, all of which were truly state-of-the-art, unlike Morrowind (and all of which, to reiterate, came before Morrowind). It takes more than just excellent graphics and open-world maps to classify as the "best of its kind" when it came to 2002 gaming; even by that point, all those aforementioned games (Trespasser, Black and White, Halo CE) had already came and left their mark on the industry forever. So when you factor all of this in, Morrowind wasn't actually that revolutionary in regards to techonolgy.

Oblivion, however, I do feel comfortable ranking among those three games as well as other revolutionary PC exclusives that came later like Crysis as being the most technologically ground-breaking games of the 2000s. Because not only did it up the ante on graphics, but it also, more importantly, revolutionized AI in truly open world games. Forget about the fact that Oblivion added full havok physics support or how it added a truly forested landscape full of thousands of trees, because it's the AI that truly put Oblivion over the top in comparison to the level of detail seen in other fully open world games from the mid 2000s or before. I can't stress enough that the AI in Oblivion was something that the game industry had never seen before in truly open world games. This alone is what put Oblivion in the game design Hall of Fame, and when you combine that with all the other enhancements/innovations Oblivion brought to the table for the open world/sandbox genre of games like Havok physics, forested landscapes, the hyper-detailed character creator (which wouldn't even be surpassed until Saints Row 2 BTW), then it becomes clear that Oblivion is absolutely without a doubt worthy of ranking among the most technologically advanced games of the 2000s all time like Black and White, Crysis, Halo CE, etc. for the landmark innovations and sheer scale of detail it brought to its game engine.

When it comes to sequels, Oblivion really might be the biggest technological upgrade of any game I've ever played. The Elder Scrolls went from having a nice game engine in Morrowind to having the single most technologically advanced engine for an open world game with Oblivion. Even Crysis, which was a spiritual sequel to Far Cry that came out a year later, wasn't truly open world. It looked groundbreaking graphically even compared to Oblivion while also featuring detailed AI and had more programing novelties than you could shake a stick at, but despite Crysis being the go-to PC benchmarking juggernaut of that era Oblivion still had a leg above Crysis from an engine perspective by being truly open world, an excuse you could not make for the aforementioned Crysis.

For the record, you should NEVER listen to what the Morrowind fanboys or the Oblivion fanboys say about these games. I repeat, NEVER. I learned that the hard way. Despite my love for these two games, the Elder Scrolls fandoms continue to rank as some of the absolute worst you can find. Let me explain: Morrowind fanboys are a bunch of disgustingly nostalgia-blinded loyalists who still to this day consider it a timeless, untouchable masterpiece of the genre that does everything better than its sequels (spoiler alert: it has aged like garbage and even for its time had more than a few flaws), Oblivion fanboys are just a huge bunch of clowns and memesters who have succeeded (much to my frustration) in making a mockery out of what was quite literally the most technologically advanced game of 2006 (and one of the most ambitious games of the 2000s), and Skyrim fanboys are a bunch of mainstream casuals who in most cases haven't even played the older games. So yeah, take whatever they say with a grain of salt. Regarding Morrowind, I still it consider it a much better game overall than Skyrim (at the very least it's a better Elder Scrolls game), but it hasn't aged well primarily as a result of the poor collision detection and the crude AI, and is very difficult to get into due to the brutal nature of the leveling system combined with the much stronger survival sim elements. I personally would rank it in the middle: above Skyrim but below Oblivion, when not taking the first two TES games into consideration (which wouldn't really be a fair comparison anyways, considering their quasi-3D design and randomly generated worlds). It's definitely not worth $15 by today's standards, but considering I'm a hardcore fan who bought his copy on sale, I'm not complaining.