One size does not fit all. You have a lot of custom servers out there that would have zero use for this. In my case I have a dire need for it. When I first started my server I was having to go and remove drops like the newbie starter gear, if I would have done this from the start I could have just flagged those items for Luclin or LoY, whatever era they came out. Instead I deleted those items, since we are progression I will have to add them back. The next stage, which is a long ways off, is to expose the expansion settings to the quest if there is not already a way to grab that (have not looked). This way you can still use the same NPC quest no matter what era your server is in.

Sure thing.

The quests would take quite a bit of work but the same idea can be used. As you, I haven't bothered to try to figure that out yet although, ideas are noted.

After working on this further I have found the spawn table will not just need an end date, it will need an expansion_start and expansion_end both. There are instances when you may have a mob that only existed during a certain period. For the majority of it you can just leave the expansion start for 0 and the end for the last expansion, I am of course defaulting those columns to the first and last expansion. Also picking 99 as a developmental setting. There will be times this will be needed because you are just not ready for the expansion to go live yet, or working midstream, you basically need a staging setting.

I have split up my spells by era now, currently putting in Luclin spells. This is working very well and I have not seen any issues. Of course the export utility has to be modified to export the era of spells your server is currently on. I may change the way it is done but I am really thinking of sticking to one set of spells per expansion. There is really not that many spells per expansion and spells were constantly changing. My thinking is just a set of spells per expansion using a compound primary key.

Items are a different story though and I am still not happy with the items table. I wish there was a way to get full list of the items at certain eras. Unlike spells Lucy has no downloads for the items table. No API exist that I can find to download or query their database. Scraping the site would be painstaking the way the history page is for each item. It could be done but it would be horribly tedious to do.

It's not part of the item packet and is a crap ton of extra work that isn't needed to get shit working.

Correct. The majority of servers do not need this. It is extra work and will make the database much larger, and more complicated. One size does not fit all.

However, there will be a lot of people need, this is a good project!

Sounds like you just volunteered!