Qutayba

I just noticed the same thing. If you use SKSE, don't launch with that. since it won't check with Steam in the same way. Launch with Steam and it will start re-downloading your content. No idea why this happened. I tried to transform into a vampire lord to get out of a rough spot and was perplexed why it was no longer in my spell list.

I understand the logic behind their new dungeon design where you want the exit to connect back to the beginning so you're not running back through an empty dungeon. But I agree with you that Skyrim took that design philosophy to a bit of an extreme. I loved the Morrowind dungeons that would make you go deeper and deeper, and you realize with mounting dread that there are now new monsters between you and the exit, if you can find the exit! There should be a happy medium between too linear and too confusing.

This will sound weird, but weapons plaques have a bug where they don't like to be oriented at 90 or 180 degrees. And this is probably your problem. Try turning the whole group (trigger and object) a different way. My shield/weapon plaques used to stick things upside down above the plaque until I turned them just a couple degrees, then they worked fine. Plaques hate 90 and 180 degrees, mannequins and bookcases hate 0 degrees. Azura only knows.

You will shake your head in disbelief, but I kid you not. The problem is most likely the orientation of your mannequin. They seem to dislike a straight 0,0,0, orientation. Try them at 45 degrees or some other strange angle and try again. I had exactly the same problem and pulled my hair out for hours. Just make sure that the Mannequin, the x-facing marker, and the trigger are all present and oriented the same way together. In short, you probably did everything right, but you've bumped into another bug. Weapon plaques and their triggers, by the way, LOVE 0,0,0 orientation, but hate 90 and 180 degrees. Go figure.

You can get your spouses to move to custom houses (you don't need to replace the vanilla ones) by adding dialogue options and accompanying scripts. New NPC's can be made for the houses, too. You'll see more. People are still getting the hang of the CK: making the house itself is easy, but learning the scripting and quest functions take a longer time, but you're right that they're very powerful. I've done some of these things in my mod (shameless plug: Whiteview Manor). There do seem to be some irregularities in how the game handles custom scripts, though, so that might put a damper on things until that gets worked out. You can also put little markers in houses that will trigger animations in the NPC AI (like sweeping, cooking, reading, etc.). However, this can be messed up by the dreaded Navmesh bug, where custom navmeshes don't get loaded if you visit a cell multiple times in a play session (so they'll animate the first time you go home, but not the second). The NPC's will just stand there. In short, all these things are possible, but there seem to be some barriers to those things working smoothly.

I suspect these may be special animations scripted into the combat in the main campaign. Since the terrain in any level will be different, you have to micro-manage a little more to make sure the dragon doesn't fly through a hill or a building. I've opened up the Mountaintop area from the Urn quest in the single player campaign in the toolset, and I see lots of yellow waypoints called "ai_move" in the dragon combat area. I haven't done much with creature ai yet, but I suspect the dragon is told to jump to a random waypoint with that name. To experiment, you might try adding some waypoints called "ai_move" in your level. If that doesn't work, you may need to dig into the creature ai a bit more.