to mod or not to mod

I'm feeling nostalgic, so I'm taking another run through the series. It's been so long that I actually don't remember much of BG2 and very little of BG1, so it's almost like I get to experience it for the first time again. In other words, no spoilers please.

Anyway, I just grabbed it from gog. When I played back in the day, I installed some user generated patches to clean up a few things that were on the CD-rom versions of the game. Are they any patches I should throw into the gog version?

Also, I read there was a way to play the entire thing with the BG2 engine. I'm not really playing any of the bg2 specific classes until I get to bg2. My plan is to create a cleric that I dual over to a (shadowkeeper) wild mage, though I'm not sure when to dual. I figure it wouldn't be before bg2 though. The concept being that he was a cleric of Oghma (Ogmha?) that eventually decided to take a more powerful path once he realized the level of crap he's in. In any event, is it worth the trouble of doing the whole thing in the BG2 engine? If so, what's the easiest/least buggy way to go about it?

Thanks for any help.