Okay, a bit of data on string growth. I have a current playthrough I started with this thread with roughly 350 mods or so. In the LAL cell the save had 51,055 strings. Now, 87 hours in with no mods removed but several added (although none that added many strings as I checked as I added them) I'm sitting at 55,700 strings. So, one test with a single modlist the growth was 53.4 strings per hour.