Hey doggedie, I think I'm in a similar situation to you. I don't want to invest the time needed to play online (plus I really would rather just play alone) but I would like to have the extra content added by these mods.
Basically I think you will find that Discovery is actually pretty much impossible to play single player, it is just too hard. That and some continuity issues is why the SP was completely removed in the latest release. I haven't gotten to far playing SP in crossfire, though it is much harder than the vanilla game, I would say that it still resides fully within the possible to play difficulty range.
