There's still a large number of us running Living Economy because it does some things EE doesn't. I ran with EE for a bit, but switched back. I found EE was removing loot from containers, so I was always getting lousy loot. Give EE a try, by all means, but just keep an eye on things. It is quite configurable, but even if you tell it not to remove loot from containers, you may wind up with lousy loot. I don't know if it tweaks the levelled lists or what... Other people have told me that they noticed the same thing - might be one of those things that's hard to track down, especially since the loot you find is random. I might even give EE another try at some point, but am running LE for now.
You could do the clean save procedure to switch to cutthroat merchants if you wanted to. I'd also use LE's menus to recalculate the prices afterwards too (after reloading with cutthroat merchants).
Everything is adjustable in the .ini file, and I do not believe that loot culling is enabled by default. Regardless, EE does the loot removal by script, and it's very easy to keep track of any items removed as EE keeps a log. Plus it doesn't touch script or quest related items. Plus this whole feature is completely optional anywho (I don't use it). The whole point of the
feature, however, was to remove the problem at higher levels of receiving
too much expensive and magical loot, and it really is quite a novel way of doing it, when combined with the rest of its features. Finally, there's also a keypress combo (in the .ini) that lets you disable the feature on individual containers if you like the idea overall but you just really want the full loot in that end boss container.
EE does everything that LE does, and more. Plus it's more compatible and works across all mods...I really fail to see why anyone would use LE when EE completely supersedes it (genuinely don't see why).