Having been away from Skyrim since before the patch that changed the way load order is handled, I come back trying to figure some things out.

So, load order is no longer controlled by the time stamp on the esp, but rather by the order the esp's are listed in a text file called, "plugins.txt"... Is this correct? Now, I'm at work, so I cannot look to see, but do I even need a tool now to control my load order? I had been a user of Wrye Bash since Oblivion.

But now I'm wondering, can I just rearrange and reorganize the the esp's listed in "plugins.txt" with notepad (or similar) to load in the order I want?

Yes, as of patch 1.5 plugins.txt controls the order in which mods are loaded. BOSS 2.0 knows about the changes in the system, as does the Wrye Bash SVN version and the Nexus Mod Manager.

You can modify the contents manually too if that's what you prefer, but that's not really recommended for when your setup starts to grow. The official Skyrim launcher itself also has load order adjustment built in.

BOSS Userlist Manager (BUM) is an excellent tool for managing load order and works with either the old or new systems.

I notice if you arrange mods order in nmm. Be it check or not it will be reflected the same in loadorder.txt. And checked mods will be in plugins.txt

This is better.

If you have a lot of mods, you will probably prefer a tool such as BUM to looking at a text file. Either can work, of course.

All of these options and their acronyms are actually confusing me even more. Is there one single tool that con reliably handle my load order needs? Or do I need to run several different tools to get everything up and running reliably? Do I need BOSS "AND" BUM? Or can I go with Wrye Bash alone? It seems that if I want to run Wrye Bash currently I need some other program to make it compatible with the latest patch?

Sorry for the questions, it seems I'm drowning in a sea of information.

Use BOSS for the most part. BUM for custom load order exceptions.

Will BOSS create a custom patch similar to Wrye's bash patches (in case I run more than one mod that alters any lists, etc)? Or do we not even need to worry about that anymore?

Still need Wrye.

NMM is the successor to OBMM and FOMM. Functionality is similar.

Copy that. Thanks everyone for the help.