Whether you use a TAOR or just blacklist certain areas, what’s ultimately most important is not having opposing armies spawning in the same places at the same time on mission start. You may have seen some people do this, but we were told very clearly from one of our lead devs who designed a lot of this framework to never ever do this. If you see others do it, it is “wrong.”

You want faction’s spawning in their own areas, then moving into the enemy area(s).

You are more than welcome to have multiple TAOR’s, or TAOR’s covering every town if you wish, but I personally prefer to keep things simple. Less is always better when you can accomplish the same outcome with less.

Filtering objectives is really a matter of fine-tuning. My understanding is, which may not be exactly accurate is, the commander places a priority rating for objectives. This filtering allows you to have him ignore small ones, or big ones. Whether that be physically small (size) or strategically small (priority).

Again I may have some of the details here wrong, but I personally use these as a way to slightly increase or slightly decrease total groups spawns and total objective counts (less is better performance) when in the fine-tuning stages of mission making.

I hate it too. The answer is kinda. In the Military Logistics module you can set the reinforcement type to “static.” This means reinforcements will only spawn at the highest priority Military Objective, closest to where the Military Logistics module is placed in the editor.

So, if you place a Custom Objective module with a 999 priority right on or next to the Military Logistics module somewhere away from your base, the spawn point should happen away enough from you where you won’t see it (or if they’re far enough to be virtualized, they obviously can’t crash in to each other then).

Obviously they still need to deliver the reinforcements, so never seeing them and risking them crashing will probably be unavoidable, but the above should solve half your problem.