I doubt anybody will see this as criticism. It can be slightly complex.
There are reasons that taborder.txt isn't included ... because many people use the software to change and rearrange their tabs ... if they then used the taborder file that would have come with the mod, they would erase their custom tabs. Instead, you have to download the file, so it has any changes and updates you may have made. Its not a big deal, other than learning that you had to download it.
On the other hand, things have changed and improved over time. It used to be that YaMMS had to be one of the very two first mods you installed, or it couldn't be installed at all without major, major work. Instead, when I recently added it to the 20 or so other mods I have installed, I only had to tweak a single minor step.
Simply because of the way the software is built and the mods are handled, there are times when you will have to make very minor modifications to the mod file, but they are usually pretty simple. For an example that is tab-like, there are some mods that add to a line that lists items displayed on the menu. The line originally looked for is something like
Home, Help, Search, Members, CP
and replaces it with
Home, Help, Search, Members, Quiz, CP
but the software says it can't find it.
So you open the file being modded, and do a search for the first part of the line, and you find that the line has already been modded by another mod. What it now reads is:
Home, Help, Search, Members, MemberMap, CP
So you add MemberMap to both the search and replace sections, save the mod, then run it again. Now it finds the line it was looking for, and adds in the new menu item, and you are ready to go.
Takes a little practice, but it is actually pretty simple stuff. If you ask in the threads about the individual mods you are trying to install, the thread authors will usually be glad to help you understand what minor changes need to be made, to get things working, and with a little experience, for these very simple conflicts, you won't even need to ask.
As for mod orders, its true, a few mods need to be done before others, to avoid conflicts. But on this version, it isn't very many. Either I have had the luck to install almost everything in the right order, or there aren't many conflicts other than the simple kind noted above.
All I can say is when you run into problems, ask for help from the mod author in that mod's thread. Either the author or somebody else will almost always be willing to tell you what needs to be done to fix things up. We're a very sharing community.