How to have a cape lizard in a zillion difficult steps

Please enjoy this screenshot of Syrius in a cape. It was basically the endboss of all Oblivion modding.

See, this came from Beast Characters lose tails no more, which requires Wrye Bash. I don't mean that it's a mod you install in your mod manager of choice but the mod author very strongly recommends Wrye Bash because it's the one they like (you see that happen a lot,) I mean it literally requires Wrye Bash, because there is some high-level sorcery going on with installing-but-not-activating-but-then-incorporating the .esps into the Bashed Patch, plus a few other Bashed Patch setting tweaks while you're making one anyway. Even people who use Wrye Bash as a simple mod sorter and organizer (the way one would use OBMM or TESMM, for example) generally don't have to bother with Bashed Patches, which have a bit of a learning curve associated with them.

But I had a bigger problem, which was that I had foolishly opted to use basically every mod manager in the world except Wrye Bash--I had most of my mods through NMM, a few through OBMM, and a few installed manually. In other words, the "oh dear God what are you doing how has your entire hard drive not caught fire yet" approach.

For a while, my Oblivion setup was a house of cards that, against all logic, somehow still worked despite everything under the hood being a complete godawful mess with nothing where it should be. Then I decided to clean up a little and get this stuff organized for real. Then it promptly stopped working.

It failed so spectacularly that I eventually decided to go nuclear, uninstalling all mods, all mod managers, even Oblivion itself, and starting everything over entirely from scratch. I knocked everything down and then began a very slow and arduous process of putting it back together in a more reasonable order. With Wrye Bash (plus a few manual installs) this time, and BOSS to keep the load order decent.

Getting my old saves to work was a trick, of course. One or two of my friends doubted that was even possible, and declared that new install + new mod manager setup + probably new mods too = just start a new game, the old ones are never going to be compatible and you're just going to break everything again. Fortunately, Wrye Bash lets you examine and even compare save file masters. If I know that I actually can load save #794 (it gives me the message about this save relying on content that is no longer present and yeah a few things are missing, but it loads) but trying to load #795 instantly crashes Oblivion entirely, then I can compare those two and see exactly which .esps I added or removed between the two and therefore which mods were the problem.

This actually got me restored back up to about fifteen hours prior to my last save (and given that my saves have about 150 or so, that's definitely a good deal.) However, the final ones stubbornly crashed on file selection even after getting their masters perfect. I agonized over this forever, eventually determined that the save files themselves were corrupt, and tried the whole "rename autosave.bak to autosave.ess and try loading that one" save restore and it worked.

I agonized with this reinstall and repair for weeks, struggling and overcoming roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, and quite honestly hit the point where I thought, "wow, I have dug too deep with these mods. I've fallen into a dark and all-consuming pit from which there is no escape. There may be spiders down here. If not, I can probably mod them in." All so I could give my lizard a cape, knowing full well that Undertale and Aviary Attorney come out soon anyway.

But I also fixed my mod setup and reorganized everything into something reasonable and lost no progress. So, you know, that's kind of neat.