Any way not to have half a dozen+ dummy characters just for storage purposes?

There are various mods and tools for this. Personally I have been using GD Stash for years, since it is totally reliable, grants unlimited storage and a nifty search function. Some dislike GDS, because it can be used as a cheat tool, but no one is forced to use those functions. :open_mouth:
GDS is a third party tool. It stores your items outside the game.

Stash mods usually increase the size of the ingame stash by a lot, which I don´t like very much.

Take your pick.