RX-7, AE86 Trueno, Gavril gladiator, Ni'san R34 Skyline, and Ford freakin' falcon XB GT don't count as real mods?
Dude, we've gotten several awesome vehicles released in the past few months or so (Gavril Gladiator, Toyota AE86, Ford Falcon XB, etc) so why should we be complaining?
Automation mods will never replace High Quality mods. There hasn't been a decrease in high quality projects, there has just been an increase in lower quality mods, which you aren't forced to download.
From my perspective, the number of high quality vehicle and map mods recently released/in beta/approaching release has been abnormally high lately. We’ve gotten some simply amazing mods this summer with a couple more approaching completion.
Also, not only are you not required to download Automation mods, Automation mods aren't listed in the main repo, and you must click on "Automation" to access them.
Dude...wake up! https://beamng.com/threads/1973-ford-falcon-xb-gt-hardtop.57729/ https://beamng.com/threads/nissan-skyline-er34.40092/page-58#post-911894 page 58 has a Attached file https://beamng.com/threads/toyota-ae86-trueno-levin.52119/ https://beamng.com/threads/mazda-rx-7-iii-v1-4.57461/ https://beamng.com/resources/gavril-gladiator.3783/ look its not only Automation builds we also got some quality mods over this month.
We are in a second coming of scratch made mods (or very well done rips) there was a huge amount of original content created about 3 years ago, then it dropped off.
If anything, Automation stuff has created much more buzz in modding, more and more people are interested from modding and new aspiring modders can be spotted learning things every day. It takes time for people to learn stuff, but certainly there are more people learning now than before, which will give much higher probability of greater amount of scratch made stuff for future.