I've complained before about how annoyed I am by the mod limit glitch in new vegas.

Typically, the internet says, "Why don't you just merge mods? It's so simple."

That takes me down a rabbit hole of ... not that simple.

The first not-so-simple
I was pointed to two different tutorials, each seemingly doing something completely and totally different from one another.  As it turns out, a merged patch and merged plugins were completely different things, despite having almost the same name.  One of them works kind of like a wrye bashed patch, I guess, and isn't what I was looking for.  I think.  

The second
I get all kinds of errors, like access violations and stuff.  Googling for a while, I think it's because windows defender is causing it?  And it keeps (somehow!) turning itself back on even after it's turned off?  I think?  It didn't come up in the really simple-looking tutorials.

The third
Navmesh conflicts.  Again it didn't come up in the tutorials, so it's another hour of googling and learning what this is and if it can be fixed

The fourth
invisible items from the mods that I merged.  Were the mods too big?  Are mods containing assets unmergable?  Is it something else?  At this point I'd had four things go wrong in something that was said to be really, really simple, so I gave up.  The tutorials were so basic, so simple that they might as well have said, "just keep clicking the button!"  It got frustrating to the point that it's not fun anymore and I tend to avoid aspects of gaming that aren't fun.

From the internet, all agreeing that merging is a simple solution... it does end up seeming like, somehow, I'm the only one on the planet that ran into disaster.  It was apparently supposed to be so easy.

But damn, I just wish the mod limit glitch could be fixed.

I guess for me, I've only merged extremely simple mods (simply because there are a lot of them)

These would be:
Weapon mods
Armor Mods
Race mods that do not overwrite npcs

Anything outside of this always seemed like I'd be messing with really complex stuff so I wouldn't bother try to merge it

Most of the time it's really simple to merge mods with similar content like said above, I like to add perks to the same category. I guess it's not really that simple and becomes harder if mods are heavily scripted or if you try to merge a lot of different kind of mods together with different assets.

Personally I use FNVEdit with Merge plugins and Fallout Mod Manager with TESsnip to merge stuff together.

I don't have very many one-off mods like a single weapon or a single armor mod this time around. Just loads and loads of new quests, new lands, new followers, and as much TTW-related stuff as I can find. Since I've played the original vanilla quests to death, this time around I'm trying to add enough content to make it worth-while to go at it again (and so, all the quests, buildings, companions, and modded locations.)
It's amazing just how fast I can end up past the 130-ish mark; 130-ish sounded like a lot but it's not. It's been around for a million years yet somehow I've never even looked at a world of pain, for instance, and it's still being updated after all these years.
And then a lot of them need patches for each other or use more than one esm/esp.
Unfortunately it keeps leading to yet another complication (like the nav-mesh issue as just one example of the seemingly ever-expanding list of obstacles to merging.) It's kind of weird as to why some mods would even need to touch the nav meshes at all, as if it's random sometimes.
i'll figure it out eventually, or just bite the bullet and cut out a lot of potential content.

Uhh, that's a problem. That is one reason why I always wanted to keep both games separate. Both FO3 and NV has so much good mods that it becomes a sore if I ever wanted to try TTW, I just can't make them equally good with mod limit in mind.

Not to mention those countless patches which some mods requires.

Yeah, I fear that's the problem -- trying to stuff two game's worth of mods into one game with an unfortunately halved mod limit. The more mods I put in, the more compatibility patches I need, and the problem just spirals out of control. But leaving them out leaves something "unfixed" or one side or the other without its full potential.
Not really understanding how modders have done some of the amazing things that they've managed to do, I tend to think modders can do almost anything (and generally they can) -- even things that everyone once thought couldn't be done in a mod. But it may be time for me to accept that modders can't fix the mod limit, not even with the fanciest scripts and fixes.