Concept: Swapping Characters

Ok so of course I see its easy enough to swap out one actor for another but has anyone done any kind of hack that makes All actors Umaro and beyond fully equipable?

Basically Im trying to take the 14 actors starting at fake "MOG" and ending at the first instance of "KEFKA"
and make them have duplicate properties of actors "Terra-Umaro" in that exact order.

Really what I wanted to do was stealthily replace certain characters in WOB with someone else in WOR so that They have the new character name/command sets but still have the old actors equip options and magic list.

one Example: I wanted you to never find Gau in WOR, But find Leo who then overwrites Gaus name And commands.
I tried a simpler approach By making original actor for Gau into an exact copy of Leo, then changed the actor for Gau to one of the unused ones (here i was fine with him not being able to equip). but the game wont load the "fake" Gau actor when he appears in battle after a fight. its just blank with no name and gau's dialog. so you cannot get him to join. Is there any way around this? Gau is like my least favorite but has a perfectly good magic list available.