I've never considered SPERG to be just a perk overhaul (hence the "Rebalanced Gameplay" part). However, things can get messy if you don't set limits. A whole lot of mods suffer from so-called "mod-creep" wherein features completely unrelated to the purpose of the mod get jammed in haphazardly, inflicting the unsuspecting userbase with a litany of unexpected changes to their game. Even if the features are well-documented, the mod becomes an all-in-one package, and users have no choice but to accept the often unwanted "features" alongside the changes that made them download the mod in the first place.

To keep myself grounded, I find it necessary to define a specific scope for SPERG. Obviously it's more than a perk mod, so limiting it just to perks isn't quite accurate. Instead, I define SPERG as a leveling mod. I try my best to never add new features or touch aspects of the game that aren't related to the leveling system. There are some borderline cases, such as the critical damage fix (ostensibly, it's related to perks that affect critical damage), but I do my best to at a minimum carefully consider each of those cases.

SPERG will always be rather heavy on the perks compared to the other leveling features, but I think a lot can be gained from a few simple features that enhance the leveling process. The best current example is the metal melting system. Without it, leveling Smithing can be a very cumbersome process. However, the ability to melt things down gives you an organic way to find sources of metal, allowing you to level the skill while playing the game normally instead of raiding respawning iron mines and abusing the transmute spell.

Although I already have plenty of new perks ready for the new version, I didn't want to ignore the other half of the mod yet again. Once the new version is out (no ETA yet, sorry!) you can look forward to several new sources of skill exp and even an entirely new leveling system for your primary statistics.

Armor Leveling:
One request (which I very much agree with) revolves around the idea that armor skills are one of the most boring types of skills to level, and to make matters worse, they tend to level very slowly. Furthermore, if you decide to switch armor types late in the game, you have to spend a great deal of time grinding just to be able to survive combat against enemies your level.

To address this, I've added a system that allows you to earn exp towards your armor skill just from running around. This works in a lore sense as armor skill really represents mobility, and I expect that's something you can improve by running across the continent wearing a full suit of plate. Mechanically, it provides a small, constant bonus that rewards you for simply playing the game, even if whatever you're doing doesn't involve much combat. If you want to switch armor skills late in the game, you can now busy yourself with quests light on combat or by discovering new locations instead of simple, mindless grinding.

If you're having horror flashbacks to leveling Athletics in prior games, don't worry. The skill from running around is far from the primary factor in gaining skill, and there are methods in place to prevent players from just weighing down a key and going to bed in order to max their armor skill.

Shout Leveling:
Speech is another skill that isn't very interesting to level. There's not a whole lot I can do about that, but several people have requested that I add a small amount of speech experience to shouting. I've been reluctant to do this because I didn't want shouting to become the new jumping, but as a compromise, I've added shout experience in combat only. It's not much, but it still gives you a way to level speech while actually playing the game instead of by buying and selling an entire stack of arrows one arrow at a time.

Potion & Ingredient Leveling:
Alchemy was never a particularly difficult skill to level, but I feel that making potions is only part of the process. By adding a small experience boost whenever you drink a potion or eat an ingredient, the player is rewarded for making potions they'll actually use instead of crafting several dozen fortify health & damage magicka regen potions that nobody wants (but inexplicably, they pay out the nose for them anyway).

Food Leveling:
I've always felt that the metal melting feature was one of the parts of SPERG that I was happiest with because scrounging around for anything shiny and dragging it back to a smelter reminded me of playing Morrowind for the first time and realizing that I could steal everything. It also gives several completely mundane objects a real in-game use, and the game world is much more interesting when it's populated by items you can use in some way instead of just meaningless window dressing.

To that end, I decided that I wanted to give food and cooking more of a use in-game. You find an awful lot of ingredients lying around or in shops, but their in-game effects are so minimal as to be practically worthless. My solution was to devise an entirely new leveling system for improving your primary statistics (health, magicka, and stamina). I consider these relatively safe to improve because a few extra health and stamina won't turn your character into an overpowered god, but it does provide sufficient incentive to make all of that food lying around a whole lot more interesting.

The basic mechanism of the system is very simple: eat food to earn exp, and when you earn enough exp for a given stat that stat goes up. The strength and type of effect on the food determines how much exp you gain and which stat it goes to, so if you really want to focus on increasing your health, you should focus on finding (or cooking) the most potent fortify/restore health foods.

Players that don't want to bother can simply eat all the food they find and expect to gain 10-15 health and stamina over the life of a character (magicka foods are quite rare). Players more interested in this system can experiment with different recipes and probably earn around 30 extra points of health and stamina, and possibly some magicka as well. Players who want to exploit the system for all it's worth can probably gain around 50 of each stat, though doing so would be very difficult. There is technically no limit to how many stat points you can gain, but each level is more expensive than the last, and at some point the amount of food you'd need to consume to gain even one more point becomes really quite prohibitive.

More?
At this point, I'm happy with the attention I've given to the exp side of the mod, but I'm always open to suggestions and new ideas. If you have anything else you'd like to see, or if you just want to give me feedback on the ideas I've implemented so far, please do let me know.

Of course, since there's now a lovely options menu that makes configuring SPERG a breeze, all of these options can easily be toggled on and off at will, and you can even use different settings for each character if you so choose. I believe in the exact opposite of mod-creep: you should be able to use only the parts you want and disable everything else.