@kinggath
I still get issues with settlers standing around (depends on the settlement, some appear to be less impacted than others), then I "lose" a couple to "friendly fire" and/or bulldoze a couple of plots and it all starts working again.
You raise a good point with the patch, but too many things load scripted objects into arrays and it's actually those that I think are breaking down and getting things lost over time. I flat out don't know how to troubleshoot papyrus but it's my working theory based on breaking things until I accidently fix them until something better comes along. At worst, I learn a little about debugging the game so, at least in this case, the journey towards a solution is just as valuable as having the solution.. This has all the hallmarks of a second order disconnect somewhere and once I learn the shape of it, I can publish and start helping with the solution.
I had a happy and more or less semi-functional Sanctuary at around 112 settlers with almost 200 Sim Settlements plots in it. That's why I've remarked so many times about how tight the codebase is for SS. I've seen it do things in game that would take me literally years to lay out and build myself and which would utterly cause my computer to embarrass itself mightily.
I cut it back to 70 settlers and again to 50 because the whole thing just stopped working about 2 weeks before 2.0 dropped. I think that Sanctuary instance tore a hole in the space time continuum because it still won't allow scrapping without a CTD. On your advice I have played around a lot with my load order (ultimately finding out the hard way that the OCDecorator vending machine needs to load AFTER OCDecorator for realsies) and fought with it until the game and I have an understanding, I don't scrap anything in Sanctuary and it doesn't ctd too often. I disable/markfordelete instead.
Right now I'm trying to figure out why none of my shiny new far harbor settlements have gotten any settlers in over 10 hours of playtime. I got the two at Dalton that I started with and a powered Beacon working. No other settlements in Far Harbor have been touched so far and still nothing. The only thing I can think of is that its over some limit somewhere or I managed to get my scripting stuck again so I'll load up resaver when I get home and see what scripts are running.
I've got a few other avenues to look down as well so I'll go down as many paths as possible and see if something works, then note what I did to get there so others can follow.
This issue is unlikely to be traceable back to Sim Settlements but anything you can throw out there for ideas of avenues to look down would be very welcome. I've already questioned in detail what has changed and I can't find anything, which means I need to know more places to look.
TLDR; Actor scripts are likely to still be an indirect second order issue and I still have much to learn.