Keep in mind the developers at Bioware are paid lots of money to create the NWN toolset, not to mention there was more than one person that created that toolset I'm sure.
Kaiyodo and Windcatcher arent paid in anything but our gratitude from my understanding. I think they've done great so far, especially for having real lives to contend with as well.
As for the db being updated on the fly, this has been discussed - but from what I remember and the way EQ works, it only reads the db items at a certain time, such as during zone boot up, so on the fly concurrent changes would be very hard to do perhaps without a recreated client as well as restructuring the emulator completely in a way that would not be nearly as memory efficient. if you rewrite the client, you're essentially making a new game, no?
You could always learn sql editing and edit your database by hand, at least you know the 'tool of the trade' would not expire with version changes.
