Some people still prefer vanilla, it's a taste thing.
Anyway, happy you liking the mod, 2 years of constant patches and tweaking went into it to make ship and weapon balance, behaviour and progression feel "right".
You will need to re-learn few things though as combat and balance are drastically different from vanilla.
As for SVE mod, it's made and balanced by other people , while it has VRO version it's also a taste thing, from my perspective it has quite few OP ships that make some other ships obsolete and this goes against VRO principle of "choice" when there is no single best ship but each has its own strength and weaknesses, same for weapons. Base VRO mod has frigates and battleships as well. I personally play without SVE, but it's still a fine addition for those who want even more ships and are not such balance maniacs like myself