1. Try using it without ARK, I believe her old versions had some issues.
2. Try turning the camera with Q/E. An old bug sometimes occurred with many characters installed that made them temporarily disappear on the battlefield. The bar on the side though I am not sure what can be done about that besides backing out/restarting.
When i removed ARK from the folder the game would be softlocked when i press New/Load Game (something I think was true of 0.1 too), am I disabling the mod wrong?
It's not just ARK though, it's most of the linked ones in addition to Risoflam's mods from some time ago. It seemed at a glance that the sprite system had severely changed since 0.1 so that's why I assume most mods still don't have that updated; Holstein, the Blue Archive mods, and probably Aon were updated for 0.12 and they don't have this issue
A lot of the mods outside of VT+ were not updated for newer systems in the game by the original authors, though there have been people who updated the mods on their own to be compatible. For now I would suggest sticking with the VT+ mods, outside of ARK.
The reason your new/loading options are freezing right now is because in that version of the game there was a bug where adding/removing a mod that wasn't there during a previous save would cause the game to try and call for information that didn't exist before, thus freezing at that screen. You will have to delete the saves in the installation folder to fix the issue. If you are using only VT+ mods though this will not be an issue, as some of the work I did actually fixed the bug for those mods.