Well, I'm stumped.

I've got my first major mod ready to go out into the world. Problem is I've always preferred to break my mods up into separate .esp files when working on them, both as a safety thing and so I can keep large overhaul mods modular. This wasn't a problem back when I modded Morrowind, if you wanted it as a single plugin you'd just combine them when you were done, but for whatever reason I can't seem to find that function in the Skyrim CK.

Is there a way to do this that I'm just missing? I can't imagine Bethesda would have just left such an important function out.

Don't count me on this, but I don't think the function worked correctly in Oblivion's CS, so it was removed.

...

Well that's unfortunate, how do large scale mods even operate now? Is there no third party programs? No anything?

You could use TESGecko or TES4Edit for Oblivion. I'm not too sure about Skyrim to be honest. Perhaps someone could link to a third party program, however as TES5Edit isn't out yet I'm not too sure.

Since Oblivion you're generally okay doing huge mods in one ESP, due to the addition of FormIDs.

It's not so much for me, that's just force of habit really. But the mod I made covers a lot of different bases, so I wanted people to be able to choose between a complete version and a pick-and-choose modular download. Especially considering that the vast majority of the new features are compatibility issue free, however two of them (perk edits and edits to about a third of the vanilla game items) are almost certainly going to butt heads with larger overhaul mods.

I guess I'll just have to upload it as is and hope that at least someone is interested in using it despite it flooding the load order. Frustrating climix to three weeks of work.