I just spent about 100hrs following guides and making a mod list. Everything works swimmingly (even the perks, believe it or not), except some textures (about 90% of city roads and buildings) are being covered by additional LOD textures/meshes. I used xLODGEN hoping that would fix it, but it didn't. I tried DynDOLOD hoping that would fix it, but I'm not smart enough to get that working-I spent about 12hrs trying to get it to work, but it wouldn't.
From what I understand, this is a symptom of the textures and meshes I want (cleaned vanilla + SMIM) being overwritten. The problem is that I've spent so much time on getting to this point, that my brain can't comprehend this stuff anymore, and I'm at the point of permanently giving up and never trying to play Skyrim again if I can't get some sort of solution. INIs and MCMs have been set up according to the Step Guide, I used LOOT and manual rearranged the mods that have to be in a specific order according to the authors, and I rearranged MO2's left pane to match the plugin list.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks everybody. The mod list: https://pastebin.com/g42sWtsP
I finally got DynDOLOD to kinda work. It made some html files, but failed to generate LOD files. It says I'm missing Beyond Skyrim - Bruma textures, but I installed both of the main files with MO2. I'm not a very smart person, but I doubt Bruma's files affect Whiterun anyway.