whatrevolution

Mix-and-match modding will nearly always route you to fixing this flaw. It's partly a shortcoming of the engine, and is the engine doing exactly what you've told it to do. You told it: "Stack all of this data and show me the result." You'll need to learn to click through by instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/98ty4j/eli5_facegen_and_facegeom_or_whatever_its_called/ https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Dark_Face_Bug For this problem, the mod installation and plugin sorting orders really only matter in the case that the instructions were already followed and the result published by someone as a patch. Every mod you add to your list multiplies the chance that you won't be so lucky. That's basically why ModDrop tried to happen and ModPicker is still happening. GEMS, STEP, and every like-kind modder wants some form of easier buttons for this stuff. We just get really argumentative about propriety.

I have an old feature request on Mod Organizer that I think you can help solve. It would involve hooking into the MO Plugin API to get your xEdit processes exposed there for MO to use. Possible uses would include assisting with plugin dependency graphing, helping MO figure out which assets are best to use, and supporting the clean MO style of merged mod life cycle. Specifically, the clear many-to-one relationship illustrated here between a merged mod (which behaves as a patch and partial replacement of assets), where the child merged mod has to be remade every time the parent sources are updated separately in MO. Because MO provides what it does, xEdit Merge should work as an automated or user-guided process, where rebuilding a merged mod is triggered by the event of updating one of its sources. That requires MO to be aware of a special "merged mod" type, and to at least have access to an invocation of xEdit that will batch the job of reproducing the merger (or handing off to the user an xEdit instance preloaded for that). For this there is a SkyProccer called Lootification.