Sweet, thanks for the recommendations! Especially Tetrachromatic--that looks gorgeous.
I've used all of the tools. MO handles running LOOT automatically, which is really handy. I've cleaned dirty packages with TES5Edit before...should still have my scripts for it in place. I don't think you can really have a modded Skyrim install without FNIS nowadays.
I've used CBBE/RaceMenu/BodySlide and all that fun stuff. Kind of ridiculous how much customization that opens up!
I always stick with beast races (I've literally never rolled a non-khajiit/argonian in any TES game), so custom race mods won't really do much for me (probably should have mentioned that!). I typically install CoverKhajiits and blah I forgot which argonian skin replacement I use so that I can make my kitties and scaly things look better. That said, I might snag the Ningheim race since it does seem to add NPCs to the world.
And yeah, I'd definitely be interested in checking out all of the
sex mods on your list.
Now that I have a computer capable of ENB stuff I'm gonna have to look into this. What are the tradeoffs between 32bit vs SSE?
32-bit has a much larger mod selection (and mods are more capable as a result of the mod extender, SKSE, being far more mature) at the expense of some stability. SSE looks prettier out of the box and is native 64-bit, but there aren't as many mods and they aren't capable of changing as much.
It seems like most of the people who play modded Skyrim are sticking with 32-bit, at least until SKSE64 becomes fully feature-complete.