I did the same. I had smartdrv, and I used as necessary the option that gave an alternative UMB/conventional tradeoff, possibly giving more room for some other driver that was loaded later. I used mscdex, of course, and fiddled with its buffer settings to get the best memory/performance tradeoff. I tried more than ten mouse drivers before finally finding the one with the best EXE size/resident size/acceleration curve tradeoff, so I could play Doom without going mad while still being able to load games that needed 600+K conventional memory. I did all the shit, that I now can't even remember, to get IPX
and TCP/IP running, which included whatever thing you did to merge your card driver and the other thing (LSL? ODI? I dunno...) into one EXE or COM or whatever it was. There was some other stuff too, I'm sure of it - even part from that EMM386 option that put the EMS page frame at the end of the HMA, to minimize fragmentation - because I knew all the tricks, deployed them all as required, and in the end my PC had something like 620K conventional memory free with just ordinary HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE. No QEMM necessary.
What use is any of this these days? None, that's what. None at all. Even at the time, most of the good games used DOS4GW, so you only needed 500K free. You'd have to be a proper completist to bother with this stuff. I guess I don't regret it, because it was more fun than trying to install fucking Linux, but overall it really was time wasted.
(One strange thing that's stuck: 25 years on, I still use the US keyboard layout. I never bothered loading KEYB.COM, because that took up nearly 30K, and it hardly seemed worth it when most of the keys were the same... and one day I suppose the wind changed, because here I still am.)