I exited without saving as I always do until I get the game how I want it, where I then start my playthrough character. Ran around Seyda Neen, to Balmora on foot, and enjoyed the new city stuff and all of it. No mesh errors, no load errors, nothing - all gravy baby.
Installed Morrowind Rebirth into OpenMW, made sure the file structure was correct, added path to the openmw.cfg in MyGames/OpenMW as I was supposed to, and ran it, everything was perfect. Ok, so I installed OpenMW into a clean Morrowind, ran it, everything was perfect. Title may or may not be misleading, depending on whether it's a compatibility thing or not.