I love how landisaurus spent all that time on a reply, because it flew right past him. Can we get a big d'oh?

Well, it really depends on how they do it. I've seen some very good models in mods. Maybe I hang around too many people that are aspiring to be developers, so they have access to the right tools.
[...]
Yes, of course. I'm not saying that no-one can do good models - obviously they can, otherwise we wouldn't have commercial-quality models in E:WoM already. I'm just saying that
most can't. Which happens to include
me. //sadface.jpg
There's many, many mods out there that are great. But for every great mod, there's a hundred average ones, and a thousand worthless ones. They may say that "Anyone can do their own race", but you can argue the same thing in GalCiv2 - with the difference that in GalCiv2, you don't -have- to make your own models. Everything is, f.x; "inside that ship there, my peeps gots likes, eight legs and a trunk".
I have faith that within a year or 2, most of our default races will be covered in a reasonably decent quality. The point I was trying to make if somebody says "I want elves", "I want orcs", "I want aliens", "I want amazons" or anything else like that, stardock has opted to say "ok... go make it yourself. We've given you the tools"
I wonder if we'll actually get a 3D-model program with Elemental. I somehow doubt it. But yes, you're entirely right -
In a year or 2. In a year or two, god-knows-what-I'm-doing-at-that-time. In two years time, this world may not even exist anymore. I could've been killed in a riot or stopped gaming due to the time constraints induced by my political position. Again, sadface.jpg!

[...]
Stardock said they would filter them for quality. They also inplied that they would create additional ones themselves (they said 'by fans or by us' ). So I would suggest only taking from the 'high quality' bin to avaid the 'har be elves' you mentioned, Luckmann.
They did? I have a vague memory that there was going to be some kind of ranking system for mods. Of course, I'm not going to download anything that doesn't fit into the main game like a latex glove smeared in vaseline. I'm incredibly, ungodly picky about my mods.
Apart from a few mods that give me additional options in civilization creation, a few political parties (which I had to modmod myself because it also included a vast number of retarded parties) and well-made "flags", I don't use any of the GalCiv2 mods, despite it's modability. They just don't 'live up' to the level.
Allowing players to create new races is great, but as Luckmann said there could be a serious balancing issue if some players try to make overpowered ones. Custom races isn't new to Stardock though. GalCiv2 for example allows the player to make new races and solves the balancing issue by giving each one x number of points to spend on abilities. As long as those abilities are balanced, no overpowered races can be made (until a mod adds unbalanced abilities that is).
You don't need to apply a mod to add unbalanced abilities. You just need to actually mod your race properly to begin with. Opening up their .xml-file, you can add any amount of any ability, without restrictions. I see no reason why this wouldn't be doable in Elemental, aswell, since they're apparently going to be built around roughly the same idea(s) when it comes to modability.