With the lightning mod I have installed, dawn and sunrises are one hour each of pure eyecandy, but when the daylight hits: ugh! How did everything become so ugly?!

Is there some way that I can make it always be dusk/dawn/sunrise/night?

You should be able to alter the settings in SimPE - the person to ask is the person who created the mod. I know that the original creator is no longer with us (Gunmod?) but someone else has since updated that mod. Maybe see if they have posted any threads about it?

You can! I personally hate night, I find it too dark to the point where I can't see. So I went on a mission to find a way to make it brighter. Thanks to Mootilda, I was able to.

You can't change the fact that the game has four states of the day, dawn/dusk/morning/night. Those are set. But what you can do is change the lighting settings for each one. I've made it so that dusk and night are the same in my game. I have radiance installed with the scriptorium, but I prefer Spookymuffins lighting colors, so what I did was borrow his dawn and dusk, and copy those to my lighting files.

Here's the thread where Mootilda and I look at it: Making nighttime brighter for the user. It's not terribly detailed as to what we tested, but it's a start. For the rest, I should be able to answer questions.

Interesting!

So I can make day look darker somehow? Because from what I can tell in Mootilda's post it's a guide for changing the brightness on nights - which means you should probably be able to do something like that with daylight.

I went into the Lighting.txt file and saw that it had all these codes for night, morning, evening etc but I could not find something that had to do with '' daytime ''. Perhaps it is the '' seasons '' that is the one for daytime? Because I'm not really sure what kind of codes/texts I should change in the file to make the day darker.

Reasonably, yes. That particular thread is about night, since that's what bugged me, but the same principle should apply. If you find the part of the Lighting file that tells the game how to display day light, and change it, you should be able to swap codes and have daylight look different.

I use radiance, and looking at file my daylight varies from season to season. I don't remember if that happens in unmodded games or not, or if it's a feature of the mod. But, looking at my Lighting.txt (base game one, I find it only sticks if I edit that one) I have one lightingState day for each season. Look in your file, and see how many you find. I'm 99% sure that's the one you want to edit. In my file, I have to scroll down a bit as there is other stuff between dawn/dusk/night and day, but it's in there.