FYI I was a modder for about a decade before I became a game developer by trade - starting out with Quake2, Half-Life at the time when mods were really synonymous with 'total conversion' and I've also modded Strike Fighters (a series that's been kept alive by modders to a far greater extent than SH in my opinion) for many years and IMO being a modder is a very cozy place.
When I mod, I can afford to take risks and since I have a day job that pays my bills I can take as much time as I want to in order to make it perfect. When I made mods for SF, I only made stuff that interested me personally, which happens to be obscure what-if designs. And I could afford to make them because I mod for me and if someone else likes it and gives it a 5 star rating that's cool. So you never have to answer to anybody.
On the commercial games I've worked on, it's always been the opposite: minimum risk, cloning what is already popular and suits making the key decisions and telling you to in effect start over from square one after crunching for weeks in order to meet a milestone or present a playable build. Or crunching for weeks on end because someone somewhere has decided that the game gets released on this specific date. Or getting laid off after said crunch
As a modder, you really have complete freedom to do whatever you want to and if someone pesters you about a release date you just say '2 weeks' and go about your business. Your only constraints are literally free time and how moddable your base game is.
So yes, modders have done a lot to fix the various iterations of the SH franchise, but I take issue with the somewhat irreverent-sounding attitude some display against the devs on internet forums. Yes, the games are broken on release, but it's not because they're being made by a bunch of incompetents and need the modders to step in and show how it's done. They're broken because there were factors outside the devs' control and they had to compromise or face cancellation or layoffs.