But that's just my opinion based off personal experience.

Other than marginally better looking grass and sickly yellow dust everywhere, I haven't found anything 'special' about it.

All I know is that I wish Bethesda had never developed or released a Special Edition of the game. I haven't come across any mods that live up to that hype yet, but it's still early days. The big argument for Skyrim SE is that it offers better stability and enhanced capabilities for better mods than the Legendary Edition. unable to play Skyrim SE because of hardware issues resulting in incredibly poor framerates even with all the ini file and video card tweaks in the world, along with 5x more CTDs than the LE, which is implicitly not supposed to happen, and so will be sticking with Skyrim LE, come Hell or high water (for full disclosure, I fall into this category). still playing and loading mods for Legendary Edition while waiting for SKSE and a modern version of SkyUI with MCM menus to exist for the Special Edition so that more LE mods can be ported over and function properly, or 2).

Meanwhile, the majority of mod users are either 1). Some authors are, in fact, near their wits' end, particularly with the Special Edition's Creation Kit, which is causing a ton more headaches than the LE's Creation Kit at this time. I'm sure trying to juggle updates and development for two different versions of the game is well-tedious.

That said, they're well within their rights to focus on whichever version they choose, and most of them feel like SE has a lot more potential than the version of the game we all originally signed up for. But it cannot be denied that the latest releases of a lot of popular mods for LE are plagued with a lot more bugs than normal). Some have abandoned the Legendary Edition altogether, or are otherwise not putting as much time and attention into development/updates into the classic versions of their mods (please note, this isn't true for 100% of mod authors, nor am I trying to imply so. Most of the prominent mod authors are currently devoting 95% of their energies into modding for Skyrim SE.

Steam mods for skyrim special edition