I'm going to be of no help here because I LOVE CHAOS and there's always a little order hidden in chaos. I usually go full-out random and do very little editing.
I do try to make sure two IDENTICAL pieces aren't touching but that's about it. 2 different red prints are fine touching for me, but 2 identical red prints touching is something I try to avoid. But if it happens between rows I don't worry about it.
I do coin stack style scrappy quilts and I put together my rows and then play with arranging the rows to get a good distribution. Sometimes one area of the quilt ends up heavy with one color but I'm ok with that. If I threw those pieces into the air there's a good chance some similar pieces would be touching so if that's how Nature does it, I'm OK copying that.
