I honestly think you're wrong about some of the "from a developer's standpoint" stuff. In terms of experience, I'm pretty sure it's a straight up numerical value. Transplanting a number from one system to a new system isn't that difficult. In terms of pretty much everything else, at this point, I think they're pretty set in terms of most of the mechanics. There'll be bugfixes, but overhauling the way data is stored in a way that would make data transfer from one system to another difficult would require a -blam!-LOAD of work. Not saying anything will stick around, just saying that your reasons for why it would be difficult for developers to make that transfer don't seem to make sense, at least to me. I have very limited programming experience, and very limited experience with data storage, but the bits I do know make it seem like it would actually be harder to make substantial changes to the fundamental structure of the game than it would be to transfer data from one server to another. Changing the way data is stored would require changes to so many other game mechanics (as well as how you define different elements to gear that's already been designed) that I doubt its feasibility.