morrowind-improved VS crawl

The most up-to-date and comprehensive guide I'm aware of is Morrowind++ Now I personally didn't follow this guide specifically (my own game is a combination of it, Thastus 2020 and MGG) but it looks really well made on it's own.

Morrowind++ (Shorter but extremely comprehensive vanilla++ guide of Morrowind, up-to-date and seemingly very well made, well-chosen QoL mods that mesh with the vanilla game. If you follow one guide, this is probably your best bet.)

Morrowind Improved goes into further detail about setting up the game. The Morrowind Modular Mod Guide has a similar level of detail.

This is a decent modding guide that includes a lot of the more recent mwse stuff. Here's a big list of lots of great mwse specific stuff, though its a few months out of date at this point. In particular I have found Ashfall to be particularly amazing, which is basically skyrims frostfall in morrowind (though better in some respects imo). Character Sound Overhaul, Aura, and MUSE cover sounds and music. Watch the Skies is a fantastic weather mod. Mort has an huge number of gameplay improvements to things like stealth, leveling, game balance etc. Theres honestly way to much to list in just a single reddit comment.

Morrowind ++ (Shorter than Thastus or MGG but equally comprehensive, vanilla and QoL focused and pretty up-to-date)

https://github.com/Sigourn/morrowind-improved/blob/master/readme.md#morrowind-a-morrowind-modding-guide

I saw in a comment you want to improve the graphics, this can be as easy as using MGE XE or OpenMW for distant terrain and Morrowind Enhanced Textures to upscale the old textures or as complicated as following a guide like Thastus 2020, MGG, or Morrowind++

Follow this guide and you'll be fine

A modern modded Morrowind has all the quality of life you could dream of. Of course, installing all these mods can take time, but luckily you have a few options there as well. If you want it quick and easy, we have YAJAN, a very respectible modlist using Wabbajack, If you don't mind a bit more manual effort in exchange for more customisability, Morrowind++ is an excellent choice.

It's probably not as rigorous as what you're thinking of but the devs of DCSS have cited online win rates of certain combinations as the impetus for balance changes before.

https://crawl.develz.org

In a similar vein, see Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a free and open-source roguelike that's been continuously developed by volunteers for 20 years: http://crawl.develz.org/

They are entirely too humanoid. I mean, look at these splash screens: Kiku, Ignis, Chei. While those images shouldn't be taken as canonical, they at least demonstrate the general inhumanity of the Crawl pantheon.

Since you like turn-based games too, try some old-school roguelikes. Many are open-source freeware so you have nothing to lose but time. I've been playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for almost 10 years.

Since Brogue's already been mentioned, I'd add Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Tales of Maj Eyal as pretty beginner friendly games.

For people who don't follow trunk, Okawru's gifting has been changed (and arguably* nerfed):

My personal first timer recommendation? Maybe Nethack or Dungeon crawl?

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Free traditional roguelike with fair mechanics and a lot of variety between species/skill/god choices (~25 gods and maybe with the exception of sif/veh and oka/trog, they are very distinct). The tiles are great. There's many developers and they are very welcoming of code or vault contributions. Reducing incentives to play tediously is one of the goals. Easily hundreds of hours of gameplay for free. Playable online (connecting to a server through your browser/terminal) or offline (terminal or tiles version). There have been win streaks of 50+ games with a variety of species/background combos so you know it's mostly fair(it IS possible for rng to give you an unwinnable game), but it's very difficult if your goal is to win every game.