The biggest catch with load orders is, that no matter how you put them together, with enough mods, you'll pretty much always need a "patch" to bind everything together. From what I've been able to gather, as I work on a few new long term projects to help with modding, mods are a fairly random thing as far as quality: written at different times, by different people, and as such, reflect different levels of quality and even totally different versions of data (outdated mods- which often break things because their data is no longer supported by the current game engine). Here's the problem though:
Think of data as being stored in records, and within those records are fields. Bethesda reads full records and write full records, even if you just changed one field out of 10 in that same record. So, let's say I write a mod and we both change the same record: I changed field#1, you change field#6, the same record will be written out (by the CreationKit) as what ever they originally were when we saved the mod, along with our changes. So, my mod has my change (record), but not yours (record). And vice versa for you. Enter a "merged" patch. A merge patch moves field#1 from me and field#6 from you, into an override record that will contain both our changes. Thus both changes exist in the same mod. The only exception is, if we change the same field. There's only one field, generally for a specific value, therefore, that's the rule of 1. There can be only one (to sneak quote Highlander here- lol!) in that case. Such as, let's say, armor DT for a particular piece of power armor. That's why modders, copy those records as completely new records, rename the armor something else, put them in leveled lists, crates, etc.,. allowing both the "vanilla" and new "improved" version of the same armor in the game.
There are general rules, developed mostly by those modding and usually their advice is a good bet to follow. Mostly, because, combining all those mods introduce scores of potential conflicts between mods, and with the rule of one, putting them in a certain order, almost always guarantees the most importan mods (such as lighting or weather) win out. But... in order to have a good stable game, the conflicts will have to be "ironed-out" even though their game artifacts aren't immediately apparent.
Good luck with your mod-out!
