Well I ran across this a little while ago
http://www.magelo.com/eq_item_info.html?num=15624 <-- the num is the proper item number in our DB also. At the very least it would allow us to get some info for the missing items that magelo has in it's DB Then when the real thing is collected with packetcollector the hand made item is just overwritten by the propper one. Perhaps some of the other info can be filled in from parsing stuff from other sources. This would include the Hackersquest items DB which seems to be in the propper binary format, but has 4 extra bytes after each item.
Note: I see this as useful to fill out missing items for the time being, not as a replacement for the packetcollected items. Also to get hand made items using the propper item number.