>If CF owns the material, then current CF staff can make changes.

It's a matter of where to allocate effort. Heroimms can't do this because they're heads-down on their own areas and haven't been sufficiently vetted to have access to areas other than their own. Team Area is busy riding heroimms to get their areas done, proofreading drafts, tweaking loaded (but not yet live) areas to correct balance issues, writing areas of their own, etc. The rest are either snooping someone, interacting with followers, handling cabal drama, etc.

If there's time, sure, I agree collapsing identical items into a single vnum and/or tweaking "similarly named" items with different stats to have slightly different names are both positive changes.