I've done both, more than once, and I keep going back and forth on which I'd actually recommend to someone asking in the help threads. So here's my honest take on prebuilt Wabbajack lists versus rolling your own load order from scratch, what bites you on each path, and who should pick what.
What Wabbajack actually is (and isn't)
Quick level-set, because people still get this wrong. Wabbajack doesn't ship mods. It ships a recipe. You point it at a list, say a big graphics overhaul or a survival-focused pack, and it downloads each file straight from the original Nexus pages (or wherever the author hosted it), then applies the exact patches, mod organizer profile, and load order the curator built and tested. The legal gray-area stuff people worried about years back got sorted; you're pulling from source, not from someone's reupload.
The upshot is huge. A list with 1,500+ plugins, hand-built FOMOD choices, conflict resolution, and a custom Synthesis/zEdit patch set lands on your drive in a state someone already played for a hundred hours. No 40-hour CTD-hunting weekend. For the big curated lists, that's genuinely the difference between playing modded Skyrim and spending your free time being an unpaid QA tester.
The case for prebuilt
If you want to play and not build, a list wins outright. The curator has already lost the arguments you'd otherwise have with yourself. Which ENB tanks your framerate, which two combat overhauls quietly fight over the same hit-detection hook, whether that beautiful grass mod is going to drop you to 30fps in Whiterun. They tested on a baseline, they wrote the patch, they froze the versions so a mid-list Nexus update won't silently break your save.
It's also reproducible. Your install matches everyone else's running that list, which means when you post "help, CTD on the Solitude load door," the thread can actually help you because they have the identical setup. That's worth more than people realize.
The case for hand-building
Control. That's the whole pitch, and it's not a small one. A prebuilt list is someone else's vision of Skyrim. Maybe you don't want their combat overhaul, or their followers, or the particular flavor of "realism" they baked in. The second you start ripping pieces out of a curated list, you're inheriting all the brittleness of a modlist with none of the safety, because you've broken the tested baseline. And now their patches reference plugins you removed.
Building your own means you learn the machine. You understand why record winners matter, what a patch actually does, how to read a conflict in xEdit, why your bashed/smashed patch needs rebuilding after every load-order change. When something breaks at 2am, and it will, you can fix it, because you put every piece there on purpose. That knowledge is portable across every Bethesda game.
Where people get hurt
The classic Wabbajack pitfall isn't Wabbajack at all. It's not reading the readme. These lists assume a clean vanilla Skyrim (correct version, no leftover mods, no Steam Workshop junk, downgrade patcher applied if the list needs the old runtime). People install onto a polluted base, then blame the curator. Second one: not enough free disk. A big list plus its downloads can want 200GB+. Third: ignoring the list's own Discord, where 90% of "known issues" already have a pinned fix.
Hand-builders' classic mistakes are the opposite. Installing too much too fast, never testing in stages, and treating "it loaded into the main menu" as proof it works. It isn't. You test after every batch, you keep a manual save you can roll back to, and you do not add 30 mods then wonder which one ate your save.
My actual advice: if you've never built a load order, install a curated list first and read how it's assembled. The order, the patches, the choices. It's the best tutorial there is. Then build your own once you understand what good looks like.
So here's my real question. For those of you who learned on Wabbajack: did having a perfect prebuilt list ever actually teach you load-order building, or did it just make the idea of doing it by hand feel pointless?