I ended up with an override install because I figured there were more conflicting mods that installed to override and I didn't want individual NPCs to be overwritten since it's meant to be a comprehensive mod. But yeah good point, not sure why I didn't consider making a second option to allow for MOD-based install. I'll include it in the next update! Re armor, the difficulty curve is more important than the absolute difficulty, so since your armors get progressively stronger they should work together fine, and like you said people can mix and match.
To be candid, actually, when I created the instruction sets, they were intended to be completely immutable. By design this *should* have been possible and the design shows the Proof of Concept.
What I didn't expect was the moment the new builds dropped, 70% of the original links were completely removed.