My course of action was to run Memmaker, and let it take care of (almost) everything. It usually worked fine. Sometimes I had to fine-tune config.sys/autoexec.bat to make a bit more room or disable EMS, but those were edge cases.

Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.