I just delved into the world of Skyrim modding. After some inconveniences with crashing and discomfort with relying specifically on some guides suggestive of what mods to install based on their standards, I considered that it would perhaps be more efficient to provide enough data to account for all mods to determine compatibility rather than relying on any one or more community or individual set of standards suggestive of what and what not to install. Certainly I still want to check out some mods that are not included in those standards, but due to compatibility concerns, I cannot do so so reliably without knowing what is causing the crash.

As a means of saving time for myself and others and for ease of installation, a package management system designed similarly to Portage seems like something that may be useful.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this idea? Does it seem like something worth developing?

I don't know what portage is or what it does, so I can't comment on that.

You can use TES5Edit to take a look inside plugins, compare their contents to the rest of your loadorder and create compatibility between conflicting records. Also manually checking that mod 2 doesn't override mod 1's loose files (scripts, textures, meshes) can be a pain, but Mod Organizer (I don't know if other mod manager tools for Skyrim do this) simplifies this immensely.