Holy wall of text batman!
Do you have a better source than the Bethesda forums? Because that is basically anecdotal evidence and doesn't help your point. The anecdotal evidence I posted earlier was about console players actually, I'm the only PC gamer in my group.
RE: Your DLC vs Mod rant. Personally I prefer DLC over mods most of the time, they are made by professionals and generally higher quality than mods (horse armor aside). Mods and DLC are both great for gaming and they show that new is better, but that's a point I'm not interested to argue at the moment.
If I try Googling for average hours, I just get hundreds of reports of the same things - either 85 hours overall for april, or 75 hours for
just the PC in February. I take it that, in recognition of the PC/Console flamewars, they didn't want to put out the comparison numbers, but again, I seriously doubt that PC players have only added 10 hours on average to their playtimes in two months.
I guess you can go ahead and believe I'm talking out of my ass, but I think I've spent more than enough time on this topic to not feel like doing research that takes serious work on it.
I will, however, say that the game was developed with the lead developer playing exclusively on XBox and how everything DLC is released a full month ahead for XBox than for anyone else because they know console players are going to quit earlier, and PC players are going to still be playing a month later, and that gives them time to patch things.
Apparently, Bethesda's trying to jam XBox's laughably horrible motion-sensor controls from Kinect into the game instead of patching away some of their mistakes, which they just rely upon modders to fix. I can't even imagine how they could think that's a good idea or how flailing your arms around while holding an XBox controller will make you feel more immersed in a gameworld when there is nothing Kinect does better than make you feel LESS immersed. Well, I know why they thought it was a good idea - Microsoft gave them huge loads of money in the desperate hope that maybe having Kinect controls in popular games would save their absolute trainwreck of a control device from the scrapheap.
And as for mods - did you ever download anything made with OBSE? That thing was basically how modders added more content for free by fans than was in the game to begin with. No DLC released by Bethesda actually expanded any sort of game content beyond giving you a new house or a couple new quests - all of which were capable of being done by mod, anyway. The only thing that really tried expanding much of anything was Shivering Isles, and that was a full expansion pack.
Meanwhile, you have mods adding in crafting where you have to smelt the iron and pound it with your hammer, training dummies to build up your melee skills, survivalist/food based game elements, economic mods, companion rules that were more advanced even than the ones that Bethesda wound up ripping off from the modders, and let's not forget tons of completely new character and clothing models.
Sure, Sturgeon's Law is in full effect, and there are obscene numbers of mere restatted palette swap clothing and "My first house" mods, but it's not hard to find the quality, and it's much more fun to completely rewrite everything in Oblivion from the ground up and play fan-made quests exclusively and forget what the base game of Oblivion ever was than it is to play with laughably thin value of getting a tiny house with a "badguy" theme or something for $5.
In fact, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (a total rebalancing of the game where Oscuro rewrote basically all the loot drops and monster spawns as well as rewrote the leveling rules and pretty much everything related to game mechanics...) was so well-done and popular that they just out-and-out hired Oscuro to work for them.
(And it seems as if Bethesda kind of got the message after Horse Armor became synonymous with "rip-off DLC", because they're promising "fewer DLCs with more content" as their advertising strategy to players, which is code for "Yes, you've made us
painfully aware of how much you thought our last DLCs were insultingly low on content for the money we asked.")