Re this half of your email:
So I'm here to ask what people use in Pd Vanilla, be it a pure vanilla solution or an external.
Reporting from a noob-user perspective, I have used acre's ds (data storage) since it is included in VRR (Virtual Rehearsal Room) for preset management:
https://git.iem.at/pd/acre/-/tree/master/ds https://git.iem.at/vrr/vrr
AFAICT, it does what it says on the tin. It saves presets as plain text files (which I appreciate for versioning), and allows for complex scenes/programs to be stored, with namespaces and remote control and everything.
I didn't try to include acre/ds in my own patches yet.
One detail:
Once you save the patch, the presets you saved get stored in the patch.
I think acre/ds handles that differently: You'd do an explicit save into a separate file that you choose.
You can check what's up in my repository for more details... https://github.com/porres/pd-else/blob/master/Classes/Abstractions/preset.pd
Thanks for sharing, much appreciated! Albert.