Poor fellow.  If only he had discovered the "Ironclad Online" button which would have allowed him to play with and against real human allies and opponents in online multiplayer (aka "The Real Sins Game").  Then he could experience a greater challenge than playing against the silly AI and enjoy more competitive, more challenging, more intense, more suspenseful, and more fulfilling games along with the camraderie that comes from having human allies and from becoming friends with other people online.  (The game's AI isn't bad as far as AI goes, but it will just never come close to comparing to the strategic considerations that human opponents present.)  He might have even enjoyed the 5v5 pickup games (pug) matches where captains draft-pick the other eight players for their teams.

The poor guy probably doesn't know what he's missing.  But there is good news!  He could still discover the online multiplayer community and at the very least play comp stomps, humans v. AI games, which would at least allow him to enjoy the company and camraderie of other people while taking down hordes of AI opponents.  That might also be a good way to become accustomed to the online game before playing against other people.

Well, there are some people who would rather mod because they just would. That being said, I have the impression that getting there was all the fun for the modder, mostly.

How many of the mods have been maintained? How many have been kept up to date with the latest game version? How many will work with patch version 1.05? All of this is very mysterious to the average player like me.

The Modding Forum works much like the standard Sins Forum, so everytime a Mod is updated, someone will post about it and the updated mod thread will be shown at the top of the forum page.

However, Modders often do what they do out of love and, sometimes, boredom. They do not get paid, and often have real life issues that will always come before modding. For this reason, Mod updates may be few and far between, and sometimes mods will be abandoned completely due to unforseeable circumstances (for instance, on one mod i was monitoring, one of the developers' computer crashed, and all his data and models for the mod was lost. He then left the development team, and as far as i know that mod is on hold).

Some of the old school mods are only compatible with Vanilla Sins v1.05, but most mods nowadays work with Entrenchment v1.03, and in fact, the current standard is to have your mod compatible with Entrenchment v1.03.

However, everything has a flip side. Yes, support for your mod(s) of choice may not be as reliable as support from IC itself, BUT, the possible level of involvement is much greater. Community communication is much greater, or larger quantity and much more frequent (usually), and you can post balance changes and even requests, and you may even be listened to, and have your idea incorporated into a mod. Best thing is that certain mods are stackable (total conversion mods [mods that change the game so you play as The Federation from Star Trek or the Galactic Empire from Star Wars etc] often wont stack due to conflicts). Certain mods that change the music, make the ships fly around like fighters, change the planet size/shape/style/type/bonuses etc. all can be stacked to enable you to play the game you want.

And, once you get confident enough, you may even start to mod yourself. Get a team together or go it solo, build your own ship models, skin them, import them into the game via a mod, and shazam, you get to send your Imperial Deathstar against a Vasari Fleet