Pick a mod you like and offer to help out with something. Modder's will part with their secrets much more easily if you're trying to help them out a bit. 

Well of course, but it sounds like if you're having difficulty teaching yourself, and want experienced people to teach you. Well I can tell you ALL of those experienced modders do not have enough time to work on their own projects, let alone donate time to help you in depth. Us modders will be glad to help with specific questions, but just "How do you mod?" is too general and time consuming to answer in an internet post. Thus if you help them with their projects first, they'll be willing to help you step by step, and once you got the hang of it you can start on your mod. Think of it like an apprenticeship.

There are up to date stickies with lots of good info here and here, and myfisto has a nice modding tutorial site here. So by all means if you haven't seen those, try teaching yourself again, and if you can start asking some specific questions you can probably skip my idea. But if not it's not a bad way to learn what you need.

7DS needs help converting .entity files from Entrenchment to Rebellion.  Go send Makon86 on these forums a PM saying you want to help and he'll tell you what he needs done.

Sounds like modding is a pain huh? and very complicated

Testing and perfecting details is the most time consuming part of this game, followed by bugfixing very obscure things (lol vertex checksum error).

Actually, we did get a script written for Notepad++ by Emberblaque, so it isn't that hard.  I just think Makon is busy with stuff you can't use a regex script for.