I can't speak for Skyrim, but I always found the JPOG mods to be severely lacking - the few of them that there appeared to be anyway, and I searched extensively. Maybe it's picked up recently, but back when I was playing the game, it was minimal.
I do understand about longevity though, however, when you've got a company like Frontier who continue to add to their games years after release, they've already got longevity - cause they're not finished. The most I would expect here would be, at the point Frontier stop catering to/for this game, they then release mod support to allow players/fan to continue to have fun. So long as Frontier are working on the game though, I honestly don't see the need for it.
I can't remember which game it was now, I think it was Dawn of War, but someone (or a small community) created an Imperial Guard mod for the original game (the Imperial Guards were added as the 5th faction) and then Relic (the game developers) released an official Imperial Guard expansion so all the work that went into the mod was essentially wasted. I can't quite remember whether it was that faction, but the development was the same, and then naturally the modders (IIRC) complained about their work being copied.
We don't need the same here; if a modder adds a missing Dinosaur and then Frontier release the same Dinosaur, that's going to cause some bitterness, and then you'll further end up with someone adding that god-awful Stegceratops. [woah] If Frontier are ever going to add mod support for JWE, they should do so only when they've wrapped up what they want to do with the game.
