I have to ask for help with this because after several failed attempts, I am beginning to lose my motivation and confidence with this project.

Here is the projected outcome:
We want to have lanterns across skyrim with lights with inverted day/night emittance. We want to be able to swap these lights out with other lights of varying radii/brightness without the need for plugin esps.


Currently:
We have 1000+ light sources across tamriel and inside the city worldspaces. Each light source consists of a parent activator, an object (lightpost, torch, etc) and a secondary activator. The parent activator is an enable parent for the other parts. The secondary activator is a placeholder for the lights. We have 11 types of light and 6 levels for each. These 6 light levels (maybe more in the future) are what we want to dynamically place dependent on configuration saved in global variables.


My current theoretical solution:
I create an instance of each light at each level in the cluxWarehouse worldspace then copy/paste each for every activator of its type (approx 7000 total instances). Then I use TES5Edit to renumber the form ids of the activators and all the light instances in a predictable way so that I can use a simple equation to grab a given light by its form id and move it to the activator.


I would like to know if anyone thinks this is a bad implementation or if anyone can think of a better way to do it. If I'm going to continue this route I need help dealing with persistence. I understand that persistent objects will increase game save size. What I need to know is 1) what repercussions should I expect if trying to avoid persistence and 2) How do I determine why some objects are persistent and/or how do I manipulate persistence.