The best mod for all three right now I would say is ALOT. They have an installer and everything, works really well. I just recently did a new playthrough of all 3 and used ALOT on all of them. That said, you need to install all of your other mods first, so any of the gameplay, UI, fix mods all get installed first then you run ALOT and it deals with the textures. It's actually fairly simple and much better than it was before where you would have to load textures every time you started the game and it would take like 10-15 minutes each time.
Now with ALOT, it just takes a bunch of time when setting it up, after that it is like normal, just with better textures. As for other mods I could list more if I was at home, but I try to only use a few, just enough to ease things a bit, like planet scanning.