I'm thoroughly pissed that my update disappeared, I put work into that.

So what ended up being the most reliable way was using Steam Tinker Launch. You install it as directed and it replaces the Proton version you're using to launch the game. From there, I did get nexus premium to get the collection list I wanted, but only out of exasperation, normally I just open each mod in the collection and manually install.

There are a few hiccups, you can't use the drop down menus in vortex, but you can scroll through them with arrow keys. Sometimes it refuses to let you drag and drop files so you have to close and restart it. I couldn't get my system to hand off nexus links to vortex, so I had to download them and then move them into it, or copy the nexus link and paste it in, but either way let it work as intended. The biggest pain is I can't get the STL windows to do darkmode so they're blinding in contrast to my other windows. That's fine if I minimize them though.

It's reliable enough that I'm still playing the same character I made after this post, my LotDB museum is coming along nicely. The game is no less stable than normal Skyrim and when it does crash, STL pops up to help me get it running again.