Updated Morrowind?

Looking to get back into the game after not playing it for a long time, but also want to take advantage of modern mods and overhauls and fixes and all the rest. A lot of the resources I've found in my searching seem to be, at best, 6 months old, so I wanted to see what was most current.

My options seem to boil down to two separate ecosystems. Either:

• OpenMW

or

• Morrowind Script Extender
• Morrowind Graphics extender XE
• Morrowind Code Patch/Patch for Purists

The main distinction between the two is that OMW restricts the mods you can use to ones that are specifically designed to be used with OMW, while the other allows you to use "legacy" mods. OMW is touted to be more stable, but the last time I played Morrowind (where I went with the second set of options) I really didn't experience a lot of crashes or bugs.

I just tried installing OMW and was a little confused by the mod installation process. Apparently I have to go into a file, add some lines to a config file, and some other stuff? It wasn't well documented and seemed needlessly complicated in comparison to just dropping mod files into the Data Files folder.

I feel like I'm spending more time trying to figure out how to make Morrowind not look like ass than playing the actual game.

Can anyone weigh in? Ideally I'd like a pretty vanilla experience, but with bug fixes, some QoL improvements, and specifically with a better (more modern) graphical experience than vanilla. It would also be nice to have a streamlined install process that is well documented.

Thanks in advance, sera!

Thank you for the responses so far! This is perfect and really helpful!