Think of all the new games you get rolled into one with all the mods available under Gold.
Gold is definitely worth it, especially since SE5 is at the very least 1 year away, if not longer.
Are you sure it was 200 mods? There are not close to 200 mods for SE4, unless that counts each custom ship set as its own mod.
But either way, most of the mods on the Gold CD are outdated and you will want to download the updates for them anyways. Check out the mods list page on
http://www.malfador.com/se4mods.html