For a while now I've been trying to make Enchantment less of a one-way street affair, but came up short. Mods that I have found on Nexus aren't quite fitting the bill - they only work with vanilla items, and best stuff comes from the mods as we all know it.

The frustrating thing is that Skyrim has the concept of a "base item" - that is, an item the way it was before it was enchanted. A steel sword of fire can still be tempered with the same steel ingot just like the unenchanted steel sword. My ideal approach to the problem of un-enchanting items (so they can later be re-enchanted) follows this algorithm:

1. Determine the base item of the item you're trying to disenchant.
2. Remove the enchanted item.
3. Give player a copy of the "base" item.

Of course, if the "base" item is enchanted from the get-go, it won't work (i.e. base item for the Ebony Blade is still Ebony Blade, so using this method will do nothing) and this approach will "wipe out" the blacksmithing upgrades. Neither of these issues are a big deal to me.

Where I'm coming up short is the methodology of determining the base item. I've examined a lot of possible Papyrus functions, but haven't found a way of doing this short of using a pre-determined formlist... which once again restricts the items this will work on to Vanilla.

Does anyone have any insight into this?