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As mentioned elsewhere, I am reconstituting my Skyrim AE mod list after a long time away playing other games. My goal is to get a stable game world established using mods that I can use for playthroughs with companions and new characters I create. To make Skyrim feel more populated, I am adding mods that expand the city outskirts as well as place other small towns on the map (Arthmoor's town mods are the backbone of this effort.). With larger cities this results in having to add a lot of compatibility patches to get various mods to work together properly. Riften is a good example of what I mean. Placing a detour road around the city, restoring a gate, overhauling the docks, upgrading the farms, and including two different outskirts suburbs means a lot of compatibility patches to keep this from becoming a real mess during gameplay. I have done something similar with the other "big" cities when there are mods available that do similar things. Once a good load order is established (just about there now), would it be beneficial to use Zedit to merge the mods that form these metropolises? I have had good experience using Zedit in the past to reduce the number of armor and weapons mods into a single blob. I also combined village mods from the same author into a single blob. So far, whenever Wrye Bash advises me to flag certain mods as ESL or ESL-flagged plugins I do it. So I am not LOOT does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to sorting plugins, but I still have to do some finetuning by hand with Wrye Bash. I would like to minimize re-doing that every time I add another mod or two going forward. Your thoughts?