College of Winterhold Hopelessness

[Moraevik]

I'm not sure which forum would be best to address this long-standing issue with Skyrim, but it's become an issue for me, now, and I'm annoyed enough with it that I might consider creating a mod to fix it. But, I need some help. So, this forum.

I'm sure most of you are aware that at the completion of the quest "Containment" all the residents of the College of Winterhold crawl into their own little holes and become unresponsive, having seemingly lost all hope for rescue. I'm sure that Bethesda thought this was a clever idea, but I disagree. These are mages and their very home is under attack. They would be fighting to the very end to see this situation resolved. That's how catastrophies bring people together to work on a common cause. At the very least the trainers and vendors should be more than happy to lend any aid they can to the player's character.

What, for me, is now a related issue is the fact that Enthir will not function as a vendor/fence after the PC becomes Arch-Mage unless you purchase or sell to him before that point. While I'm sure this isn't his intended behavior, I'm not aware of a fix to this problem, either.

I consider both of these to be serious issues, since they make no sense at all. The first is completely arbitrary and contrary to basic human nature. The second appears to simply be a programming mistake. Perhaps it's time to address them, especially since in my current play-through I'm seeing both of these problems at the same time.

Yes, I know, I should have been thinking harder about it and not advancing the Thieves Guild quest-line to the point where I have to talk to Enthir while I'm still on the Mage's College quest to get the Staff of Magnus, but I guess it took this little bit of personal stupidity to light a fire under my bum and get me to actually do something about it. Chalk it up to a long hiatus from playing Skyrim and my aging brain cells not always retaining things unless I exercise that knowledge frequently.

My problem is that while I could have solved both of these issues easily if this were Oblivion, it seems that Bethesda has gone out of its way to completely obfuscate how the AI functions in Skyrim. I've looked at the characters in the CK, I've tried to figure out what's going on by examining the quest, and I've even looked at the scripts and nowhere can I find just where ordinary dialog with the characters has been diverted to the "Woe is me" remarks. The problem with Enthir not vending/fencing is equally occult. I'll admit that I'm a just a bit out of my environment in this stuff, but solving problems like this is how I learned to mod in Oblivion. Maybe it's not quite that simple with Skyrim, but I'm willing to give this one a shot.

I'm not even going to speculate on the Enthir-specific problem, but one would think that the unresponsiveness of all College residents is controlled by a single variable, but what is it, and what script does it involve? I'd really like to be able to do something about this, but I'm at my wit's end about where to even start, now that I've looked at everything in the CK that I think might be involved.

So ... anyone care to give me some hints about what might be going on here, other than the usual "work on some tutorials" advice? I've looked at AI tutorials and so far I've found nothing that isn't just as confusing as how the AI is handled in the CK. I want to address these problems directly, without having to wade through excess baggage that doesn't have anything to do with them.