^ good for you dude!
I'm also pretty unorganized... I usually make busses for sidechaining purposes, so often I have one for bass and one for "other stuff". Otherwise I only make a bus when I need to apply something like a filter on multiple instruments. But nowadays I also try to minimize the number of mixer tracks I work with, so all sound design happens in the synth or in Patcher.
Yea, A good portion of my sound design comes from reason's combinator. An alternative to that is the image line's patcher. I also think ableton's effect rack offers the same functionality, but that's at a glance.
The cool thing with reason's combinator is you can drop in the original mixing board and you have access to more parallel/buss channels before you get to the main mixer board. So you can do some pretty fun things with the routing, which is a personal favorite activity of mine.
To a point you make, I also try to put the least amount of tracks in my songs as well.
If you make the signal going into the mixer really rich and can control it, you don't really need a whole lot else to slap on it aside for more "aesthetic" effects on the sound to make it stand out a little more.
