Incidentally, kasnavada, these past couple days I was doing some experiments with loading dll's at runtime and I've got the logic for generating the galaxy map such that you can basically write your own C# function to generate the map, and tie that to a map style (new or existing) in the xml. So more than just pure data modding will be possible after all At least, assuming we don't get some unanimous response of "argh! no security at all! plague!", since it is very much a no-lifeguard-at-this-pool sort of modding.
There are other parts of the code I hope to make moddable in that way, though some of them are very sensitive to being handled exactly correctly in terms of thread safety, etc, or bad things can happen.
"There are no lifeguards at this pool. There are, however, multidimensional sharks."
Ah, well, that's good to know if it's possible =).
And the security risk... thing is that Arcen has an history of "hey, modding's useless, just ask Keith & Chris and they'll code it". I basically was prepared to some kind of opposition when I spoke about modding (it was much more than I anticipated though, I should have been much clearer on what I meant).
About the risk, well... this form of modding basically is rewriting part of the game code, so it comes with that kind of risk.
Also, from work, I've had people crash our applications by misusing our APIs. Again I'm back to rimworld - because it's the one I'm currently following - but those guys even have a section dedicating to mod bugs
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?board=23.0 =). As far as I can tell, while I agree that "you can break the game with dll modding" ain't that much of a selling point, I don't think there are many solutions to allow others to make additional mechanics, so my belief is that this risk is expected and understood. On the "plus side", some of the most popular mods there depend on "modder" code. So there is that. Special thanks to hospitality mod & prepare carefully by the way.