someone explain to me wat in the furk is going on with facegen textures in SSE

so i spend, 2 hours trying to troubleshoot specific crashes, i find out a few mods that might be the culprit have .tga files in their facegen folder. What I read was that facegen textures need to be in DXT5 (implies alpha channel),

these original files from oldrim appear to be DXT5, they have an alpha channel, but they are 1024kb or so;

I've checked the vanilla (SSE) facegen texture files; they appear on the surface to be DXT5 with a white alpha channel. When i spent hours converting the oldrim facegen textures through photoshop, they all came out to 342kb, coincidentally the same size as the packed vanilla dds files.

but then i find out Bethesda is using a new DXT10 format for dds files. ok i download the photoshop plugin, but when i open them, i get no alpha channel.

if i personally converted a mod from oldrim to sse, i'm wondering if they still need the tga files; also i'm wondering why this new fangled intel plugin can't recognize the alpha channel. It doesn't matter, i removed it b/c it angered me anyway.

my crashes are so specific, on entering a cell i look at a certain person and crash. I've exhausted almost every other possibility known to man. I just need to be sure how these work, as two of these mods from oldrim crash the ck when trying to save. so that's out of the question.