25th & 10th Anniversary Challenge

1. The shop graphics will not respond to graphics assignment. The only real way to change the shop graphics is to replace the appropriate sprite-sheet in the rom. In order to make Leo show up in shops in Divergent Paths, I have had to actually swap Leo's and Umaro's sprite sheets, then edit all of the events and battle events to point to the correct sprite. It took me almost a month to find all of the addresses I needed to edit. I would NOT recommend going through this effort just to "be clever".
2. Magic lists are by profile (properties X), and not by character slot (character Y). If you, for example, moved Locke from $01 to $0E (though I don't know why you'd ever do that), his magic list should travel with him. Then again, I've been working so long with the MMMMMagic patch that I don't know if the vanilla rom operates the same way. I'm assuming it does.
3. The Merit award as a non-removable relic is an interesting idea. In addition to setting profiles (X) to equippable, you'll also need to make edits to the C3 bank so that the Actor Slot (Y) doesn't buzz the character out from the equip menu. If you search for threads on making Umaro equippable, you'll find the line of code you need to edit. But aside from that, it just might work.