Now, I'm not quite sure what advances the patches have made, but that same exact problem has manifested itself into JUST ONE modification in my downloads list. The Italy: The Renaissance mod downloads perfectly, yet does not advance to the process of actual installation. That is, after downloading, there is no INSTALL MOD button in the INSTALLED tab. Later, I found that when I restarted Civ 5 it had not even registered as downloaded, so I had to download the whole thing again to no avail. Still no install possibility.
Any way I could check if the file is reaching my computer? Any way I can contact the author? And so on and so forth.
Oh and thanks for answering my terribly needy first post!