Yes, I understand your sadness, Flat.
I finally gave up on updating my game and prevented Steam from undertaking such unnecessary changes. Once I was happy with the content of my game, as far as mods were concerned, I froze the operation. Steam continues to state, in my games list, that my game requires updating but I ignore it. I've never used Steam for mods preferring to go to the Nexus directly so I've had no problems there either. I continue to use the last stable version of SKSE and, up to now, have experienced no crashes.
To tell you the truth, since the addition of the G-SYNC monitor, I'm so happy with the look and content of this massively modded game there isn't much I want to add or change.