I ask because I lost my save games recently, and I have to start over again fresh anyway, so this is isn't the usual "do I really have to wait for my mods to update to continue" question. Just looking for a bit of advice if I should just go ahead and leave my install as is, or revert to a more minimalistic appraoch for a while.

there is no such thing as a clean start unless you remove all mods and reinstall your game.

I'm not very far into the DLC myself, first town actually and did not turn off any mods. Well I added aMidianBorn orc armor texture mod and turned off a vampire cbbe mod I didn't use. But thats it. Most mods I run are flora/HD textures, water, body and armor textures. about 100 I would say. no issues so far but like I said. not far into the DLC. It would be hard for me to turn them all off and then try and remember what order to turn them back on with. Would seriously mess up my characters and result in missing armors/weapons and stuff.

run what you got and see what happens.