How do you all handle organizing patches when your collection outgrows your display space?

Started collecting patches seriously about two years ago, mostly national park service patches at first, then it spread into state police shoulder patches, and now I have a pretty solid pile of military unit crests that I picked up at estate sales. The collection has grown faster than I expected and I am running into a real organizational headache.

For a while I had everything mounted on a corkboard in my office, grouped roughly by category. That worked fine up to maybe 150 patches or so. Now I am somewhere around 400 and the corkboard situation has become kind of chaotic. Patches overlap, I cannot find specific pieces without unpinning half a row, and the whole display just looks cluttered rather than intentional.

Some things I have tried or considered: binders with clear sleeves (works okay for storage and flipping through, but feels like hiding them away), shadow boxes grouped by theme (looks great but gets expensive fast and takes up serious wall real estate), and flat storage in divided organizer bins sorted by type (functional but you lose all the visual enjoyment of actually seeing them).

A few questions for people who have been doing this longer than me:

• Do you separate display pieces from storage pieces, or do you try to have everything accessible at once?
• For patches with heavy bullion embroidery or thick felt, do binder sleeves hold up okay over time, or do they distort the shape?
• Any particular grouping logic that works better than others, like by origin, era, shape, or color?

Curious how other people have landed on their systems, especially if your collection is in the few hundred to thousand range where things start to get genuinely unwieldy.