I am confused about why it would be a gigantic undertaking? I would have thought just copy the current items, make the copy augs instead of wearable. Then make a duplicate of the recipe/quest to get the original armor with some slight modifications to turn your wearable armor/weapon into an aug. Maybe I don't understand the logistics but I thought most of it would be copy and paste and batch edits.
If you were to allow the players to use the aug or the original item (again, t4 monk as my example punching bag), then you would need to literally double the code size for the "next-tier" checks. You would need to check each slot to ensure that it had an aug(s) matching ID XYZ (assuming augment checks can even be done through Perl) versus actually checking to see if the original item is equipped in a non-aug form.
Simply copy/paste items isn't terribly hard. Copy pasting the quest code would be significantly more annoying as numerous pieces would need to be semi-unique.
On top of it, each class gets 8 unique items across ~14 unique classes. That gives us 112 items per tier. Currently, that would give us 1008 new aug needing to be created, assuming we started only at tier one. Admittedly, most of those items would be copy/paste excluding a few alterations (column edits). The sucky part is manually pairing up all the IDs to the actual tier progression checks so players are not giving "easy" access through oversight or simple fatigue (or conversely, unable to join because somewhere in those thousands of new lines, you skipped one item ID and threw the bulk of the tier's checks out of balance). When corrected, it isn't much of a problem anymore...it's just getting to that state that makes things....depressing.
Hope that helped a bit. :-)
-Hate
