Hmm, after rethinking what I said here, I feel that I'm only "shooting" down at your idea which isn't really my intention meow, so I'll give a little suggestion and admittedly probably not too well thought out either but here goes.
Perhaps revisit community collections or add another type of collection. Instead of having the gold ratio at a HIGH cost as in 15 gp to 1 point, make it more online to where more people are actually tempted to use gold to buy something from them. Or instead of increasing costs in materials make those lower as well. When you go to increasing reward costs or to "nerfing" how many points you get for your effort, it may seem "conceptually" a good idea because "Hey we can drain MORE out of the already messed up economy!" which is in theory a good idea, but it's failed I wouldn't say misreably but you can't deny it failed. Hell ever since the re-adjustment of these values I'll tell you exactly how interested in actually messing with it I have been.. NOT interested. I simply wait til I see someone either selling the items I'd be after in general chat for cheaper than I could go and get it, or when someone wants to trade something for something, like Trading Mace and Shields for a Tangle (just an example). The problem with the current economy is not just gold being out of the scope it was probably ever conceived to get to, but there is also a MASSIVE accumulation of raw commodities, which still has a good market, and there are alot of people who legitimately got these goods, as well as ones who got them in ill conceived manners. So to effectively influence the economy you have to take into account more than just the gold aspects, resource sinks (OMG luna got smashinated by a giant meteor! Help we need boards, ingots, and gold to help rebuild! here's a shiney something or nother for your help! HELP!) and it shouldn't effect the luna areas at all of luna, and the bank and basic services should still be remain there, but people like luna for whatever reason, and I could see a lot of folks helping to rebuild it, both new and old and hopefully those with heavy pocket books.
Sorry Velvathos that I got this far off topic, but I saw some things here that kinda lead me astray so I'll get back on Original Post here.
For customizeable housing, and your thoughts on the 4 hour "refund" timer; that's a good idea. A lot of times though, if I design a home and am messing with it, I'll get those basic concepts done in a day and probably won't touch the contextual menu customization for a year, or 6 months. I go through houses alot but I think my temptation is because I design pretty homes and people offer handsome rewards to purchase them, and then rejiggle here and there to fit their use or personal flair. I'd like to see addition of just more tiles in general. Especially in the roof variety. For a lot of the homes I build, most of the tiles for ceilings just look deplorable (mostly color issues). But there are some cases where it's just the tile set itself. I would also suggest adding more of those "curvy" tile types, not just the big thick stone tile set. And different variations on the "curvy" rounded tile set I'm talking about. I'm getting tempted to bust out the ol' paint program and have a go at some ideas, but be warned, I'm no Norman Rockwell when it comes to digi art meow.
