I find mod compilations and lists to be great for bringing in new players.

However, I advise against installing any modlist, small or large, without EXTENSIVE research.

Due to the number of different mods that can be installed,  it is extremely time consuming to bug test even a single new mod with even 1% of available mods.

Every new mod added is one more element in a geometrically growing series of interactions between each mod's items, locations, effects, scripts, etc.

Bug testing even single-mod to single-mod will follow a geometric law like (n-1)*n/2=# of test scenarios, where n is the number of installed mods.

Just number-wise alone, a 50-mod list would have a maximum of 1200+ different test scenarios to find a bug without direction, and that's only counting pairwise mod intereaction.

If 3-mods start interacting, the problem gets even larger. And there are modlists out there reaching well above 300 installed mods. And that's not counting any variances in each mod's behavior due to different overwrite scenarios in mod managers.

Fortunately, mod users and makers don't have to debug blindly; papyrus, SKSE, and mod-specific logs can greatly cut down the number of bug culprits.

For easy mods like armor and followers, bug detection and fixing is usually not too bad (since armor mods are usually just an ESP to contain the items, maybe a weapon, a spell or two).

However, the more in-depth mods which change core game-engine elements like animation behavior, AI, new locations and worldspaces, physics, etc. are MUCH more likely to have bad script and behavior interactions.

Debugging a 20-mod list? Easy and relatively quick.

Debugging a 100-mod list? Not too bad, but significantly more time consuming.

Debugging 250+?

If they're armor/follower mods, especially if it's built up slowly over time, not too bad.

But Movement and Combat Overhauls, Nemesis, Sexlab, and 50 more core gameplay changes all at once?

Even tracking down a small incompatibility will become a problem very quickly, if true game stability and playability is what is desired.

Installing enormous, pre-made modlists that are built with lots of highly in-depth, game-changing mods have to pay in mind not only the included mods and what they do, but also the modlist history and the modlist author's experience.

There are things in my own modlist that I install manually, and aren't in ANY of the install files that I keep in my mod manager.

I keep them around because of experience of what settings work that I want replicated perfectly 100% of the time.

Some examples:

• Modified Bodyslide files with tweaked physics settings (certain box combinations like "Skinned, Dynamic" will cause crashes with different physics packages) and updated body types.
• Personally customized INI files to make sure everything works correctly (all the way from simple override slot increases in NiOverride, to full saved MCM configs that can be loaded install-to-install)
• Modified ESPs to add the right keywords to items to ensure item detection works (like Jewelry mods where the items are not correctly identified, items without keywords, etc.)

I don't expect anyone to act on this information, but pay in mind that when a mod author asks you to try and recreate a bug in your system, it's not because they're not trying to replicate it on their end, but because it could be a bug that, due to individual setup variance and the number of mods installed, could ONLY be replicable in a timely manner on the user's particular setup.