Your biased value judgement is unnecessary and inaccurate and, given your years in the community you should know better. By your logic, using a mod manager, or BethINI or any number of other modding automation tools would also be 'the lazy way out'. Collections and curated mod lists are popular because it means you can be playing the game you want more quickly than if you had to install everything and resolve all the conflicts yourself. Is that being lazy in your world? The implication of your comment is that not using a collection is somehow a more noble method of modding your game. It isn't. De-bias your mind from this mode of thinking. It will likely create more problems. If you want to do this, I recommend you become familiar with SSEEdit in order to identify and resolve any conflicts that arise. In terms of whether it will be easier and faster to download every mod independently - it would depend on the size of the collection and the nature of the mods included. I would think that in general it would still be faster to use a collection as you would still need to spend time resolving conflicts that may otherwise have been resolved in the parts of the collection you decided to retain.