I'm not so much preaching other codebases over SMAUG, it's simply that the time and frustration you'll spend on these projects with SMAUG could be put to far better use elsewhere. As you've already noted, most of the source material for these snippets has long vanished from the web and working it up from scratch, particularly as a beginning coder, is going to be far more effort than you realize yet. Something as seemingly simple as the night descriptions for instance is going to require changing your area file format which necessitates either extensive modification to your existing areas or some extra modification of the code to handle the existing files breaking the new format. You're also going to need to go in and add night descriptions to the existing areas if you want them to exist which is another workload on top of the coding.
As for your specific issues with my previous suggestions:
1 Does *every* mob *really* need randomized loot?
4 Not if you set the prog up properly. Hand in 2 items, mob 'combines' them, hands back finished 'upgrade'. meta code looks something like:
bribe <item 1> or <item 2>
if not holding other item already
Nice, do you have <other item> as well?
else
Excellent, one moment while I perform the necessary rituals
<insert effects as desired>
load finished item by vnum
hand finished item to player
junk base items
endif
Unless you do something crazy like allowing the same gem to be added to all of the upgrades, no duplication is possible this way. Granted, this way you end up creating a few extra prototypes but it's not like you're in any way really concerned about hard drive space quotas for your code. Log files, now those might be a hard drive quota issue but that's another matter entirely.