I do not believe there are any mods currently under development for pre-gold SE4. Gold just gives so many more modding options... Same with AI writing for ship sets. Really, the only 1.49 mods that were not converted to Gold were the ones where the mod authors left the community for some reason. Almost all mods were converted to Gold.
http://www.malfador.com/se4mods.html links to pretty much all mods and lists which SE4 Version they require to run. Most require Gold.