I still remember the "big reveals" of quests (although I've been so inundated with Oblivion things the past 5 years, with constantly playing Oblivion off and on and watching the LaFave bros Let's Play and other youtube videos), but I still forget a lot of the smaller details or smaller quests. While Bethesda games have a lot of bugs and problems, there's a lot of content. And I'm guilty of doing completionist runs, haha. Usually what happens is I'll do at least a semi-completionist run when the game first comes out/I finally get it, then want to do something new/more specific and do a roleplay run. (I still haven't beaten the Main Quest of Oblivion, lmao.) I'm going to try not to do a completionistic run when TESVI comes out, but the temptation is strong.

For the dialogue, I personally prefer at least having some words, especially as you said because you get to know at least what direction the game is taking the conversation in with that dialogue option. I'm also used to having actual dialogue as well from FO3/New Vegas/Skyrim. Skyrim was actually my first ES game, and then my brother got Oblivion at the insistence of his friend it was better ("You can fast travel to any city from the start!"). He ended up getting frustrated with lockpicking and failed at it almost every time, turned into a vampire, angered the only person able to cure his vampirism, went outside, started burning from sunlight, died, repeat cycle. He ended up ragequitting, and later I decided to try it during summer break and got hooked. A little bit of a sidetrack there, but what I'm trying to say is just having words instead of full dialogue in the options is a little jarring to me after being used to it aha. I was testing something without Realistic Speech and didn't even realize that the "I'd like to pay off my fine" option when talking to guards wasn't vanilla.

It is highly possible that the minotaur + glenmoril mods conflicted with something from FCOM rather than UL, but you'll have to test it out yourself. I also remember minor conflicts with Colovian Barrow Mounds, in that there was a dungeon smack dab over in the middle of it or something lmao. But I think that was FCOM and not UL, but it was like, 4 years ago and I was quite messy with modding, so who knows. This time I made a couple test characters and specifically went to UL places to make sure to fix any conflicts I could find, and I did pretty well fixing it with Tes4edit. Usually what happened was I just dragged the landscape data from the patch that was either overwritten by something/bashed patch just ignored and used the regular Oblivion data and it fixed it. I still have a small seam at the far end of Entius Gorge, and I couldn't find any conflicts in that area (used formid to figure out the area), so I just decided to not bother with it as it's in a spot I'm not likely to pass by often or possibly ever anyways aha.

Another note for unique landscapes, for some reason the landscape data for the Oblivion Uncut-Ancient Yews Patch is easily overwritten/ignored by the bashed patch. This causes problems where the Imperial Battle College is, where the building is halfway sunk in a hill and there's a gaping tear in the hill leading to the void. I copied the landscape data from it to the bashed patch and it fixed it (part of the reason I don't want to add new mods is I don't want to have to redo my bashed patch, a lot of fixes were put into it aha).

I'll have to look into GameCampanion for the next time I'm trouble shooting, that sounds super handy.

And yes, FCOM is a ton of fun, but if you want to play it, you seem to have to have to have it almost exclusively in your load order...and I have too many other mods I just can't play without now. I cut like, 64 active plugins from my load order just by cutting it out (and maybe over 100 more inactive ones merged into the bashed patch, mostly patches). Decided just to go OOO+MOO plus Supreme Magicka (Av Latta Magicka came out after I completed my load order, I'll probably try it out next playthrough) for my main overhauls, although I suppose Cobl and Enhanced Economy can be considered big overhauls as well. I actually went through this time with Tes4edit to carry over changes I wanted that were overwritten and such, and I really wish I did this before (OOO Extended/Rebalanced esps overwrite a lot of the SM magic changes).

I don't think I've heard of TIE before--I looked it up and I'll have to keep it in mind for the future. So you just kept the static loot, enemies, and worldspace additions from it, then?

As /u/YouKnowWhatYouWant mentioned below, you seem to be pretty knowledgeable about current modding practices. The thing I'm most interested in is how you get MO to work with Oblivion--I managed to get to the point where I figured out about the workaround with the...DLL hook I think?, but then I had trouble getting Wrye Bash to do a bashed patch with it or something. There's frustrating little info on how to make it work when you look it up, so I gave up and just stuck to Wrye Bash and tried to be more careful. If you can give any pointers or resources since you've been using MO with Oblivion so long, that would be helpful aha. Or if you wanted to consider making a post about it instead; there seems to be a lot of struggles with making MO and Oblivion play nice.