Every design below would have been easier to build. Most would have been easier to run for about a year.
A central database. One place to put every mod, every release, every update. It makes the index’s infrastructure authoritative and operationally special: somebody has to keep it up, back it up, migrate it and fix it at 3 AM, and when that somebody leaves, the knowledge goes with them. Publisher sites already hold the data, and Git already holds the history.
A persistent web server. Nothing on this site depends on who is asking. Rendering the same pages on every request adds a process that must be running for AsHyAmS to be visible, and a security surface for no benefit.
A manually maintained project database. Somebody copies metadata off mod pages into a form. It rots the moment the mod updates, because the copy has no reason to follow. The protocol already has every project describe itself.
Scraping HTML. Pages are for people and change whenever the design does. DreamWeave has a documented machine protocol with schemas. Reading anything else would be choosing to break.
The GitHub API as the source of truth. Hosting is not identity. A project can leave GitHub, and a GitHub repository name says nothing about which mod it is.
The Nexus Mods API as the source of truth. Nexus Mods is an integration and a source, listed in manifests as such. It is not where a DreamWeave project’s identity lives.
URLs as project identity. Projects move. A mod that went from GitHub Pages to its own domain would become two mods.
UUIDs as proof of publisher. Ids are chosen, not allocated. Treating a matching id as the same publisher would let anyone take over a project’s page on this index by copying one string.
Recursive crawling. Following every URL a manifest mentions would let one manifest enroll arbitrary third parties, and would crawl the internet by accident. The reviewed source list decides what this index reads.
Proxying downloads. Routing archives through this index would make it required for distribution, which is the one thing it must never be.
Download counts and popularity. There is no telemetry, so any number would be built from proxies, and a ranking built from proxies is a ranking of the proxies. Counting downloads would also need a server in the path of every download. AsHyAmS does without both.