Twilightdusk

The names of a number of DO and SO enhancements imply something about the source of the power, and from what I can tell people feel free to ignore them (One DO category is "Genetic Enhancement" for Science/Mutant origin, nobody feels the need to justify how their character is able to do such a thing. Another is "Relic" for Magic/Natural but you don't see everyone RPing that they're carrying around the specified magical artifact to boost their abilities). Incarnates, from what I gather, are much the same deal, except that the way they look in action makes justification necessary.

This is the only thing in the game where an RP justification feels needed, and while that's partly on the playerbase for not caring about other things that dictate something about their powers, the people behind the content should at least be taking notes that players care about this fact.

You can't think of this as a seven year old game. It is indeed seven years, but the game has gone through significant changes, and that apparently includes what minimum hardware you can get away with using.

1) Given the nature of using a staff in this context, they'd only need to make 1 (or maybe 2, one for offense one for defense) animation involving the staff for each body type, and copy it to each power in each powerset that gets deemed as staff-appropriate (a bit stale? Maybe but there's a lot of repeat animation within a lot of the powersets this would be applied to anyway.)

2) Costume pack: Staves 480 PP. Given that the staves would need to be added into the costume options anyway, they could justify selling the entire weapon type, and thus only people with access to the stave costume pieces would be able to use the new animation. 480 PP isn't as much as 800, but see above about how they wouldn't exactly need to make 27 animations per powerset they would be used in.

Just my 2inf

I specifically said "drop" :/ I like IO's too but between the recipe and ingredients,
it's harder to buy if it doesn't drop, and is harder to get purely through drops.

Erm, maybe not at endgame, but I'm level 15 right now (bit of a noob) and DOs I can use that drop get slotted immediately.

This. Exactly this. By having broad categories, we can be assured that any concept you can think of can fit into at least one of them (I challenge you to come up with a character background that can't somehow be fitted into one of the existing categories), but your more detailed lists limits the possible origins to 8-9.

I could come up with my own example, but let's take one of yours Rahvin. In that rant about how "oh, by that logic, ANYTHING can be natural!" you mention Faries. Where would they fit in your new categorization?

In the current categorization, nobody would hesitate to say "magic," but they neither got their power from an artifact, nor were they gifted with the power through study or divine intervention, for them it's simply natural though it doesn't fit into either of your "normal" categories either. So what do we list them as? Alien? While that may be technically accurate I'm assuming that you count alien under science? What business does a Fairy have having science-type SOs and DOs?

If you want to allow as many different concepts as possible, vague = good. If, for some unfathomable reason, you 'want' to limit the number of possible character concepts for players to work with, then sure, go for more and more detailed origins.

But like you said in the end, this wouldn't have any effect on the gameplay. All it would do would be to force everyone into a set of backstories, in exchange for you being able to have "mystic" in your title instead of just typing in the bio space "This hero got his powers through years of arcane study!"

Granted I'm a noob so none of this applies to me personally yet, but I think part of it might be a conflict of interest between:

a) I want to stay true to my character's concept
b) I want to be as powerful as possible

So unless your character's concept fits these Lore Incarnate things (again, noob, no direct experience with this), you'd have to compromise between being powerful or staying true to concept.

Put another way, if the game is letting me be a mutant fish monster wearing a tuxedo who has a pirate hook for a hand, robot legs, and a demon tail, why force me to conform to a certain vision at the endgame?

OK, I think this was the key part here. The description of the power said something along the lines of "You can only use this once" So I thought it was something you'd just cast once when you get the power and then never think again. But if it's just a buff that you can cast after summoning the pets, that's much different, so thank you very much.

Speaking purely from an aesthetic standpoint, not from a gameplay one, it could make sense that someone would want to make a character with both Archery and Trick Arrows, to be a purely archery-based character without anything else in the mix.