I'm just a fellow user, so in my own experience for about a month I've had Irony Mod Manager load big mods as follows:

(Music, flags, namelists and portraits stuff)
Scoot's Relic Wars
Gigastructural Engineering
UI Overhaul and all it's compat mods
24 Building Slots
(Shipsets and their patches)
Everything Spawns (turn on compatbilibty patch with ACOT and ZOFE only at gamestart, then disable or you'll get stuck with blank popup spam)
ACOT
ZOFE
Alternative FE Buildings (aesthetics)
ACOTR Override
NSC2
Extra Ship Components NEXT
Ultimate Tech
Precursor and Archaeology Story Packs
More Events
Real Space
Planetary Diversity and it's dozen add-ons

I spent the better part of two days going over this list to get it updated for Aquatics. Not sure it's perfect, but so far I'm having a lot of fun and the mixing of mods trying to get the AI to be better has some interesting results I didn't expect. I hope this helps.

So, does this load order work for you without crashing the game? :)