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.

Yeah, I started to suspect #1 after I made the post... which is a bummer because I wanted to change several character graphics in the World of Ruin and the shops will not reflect that.
I found the relevant block at C3/6D79 of the disassembly; I was able to inject a subroutine that forces a graphic change (tiles only, not sprites) based on an event bit being set (It basically checks the actor number, then checks the event bit, and then loads a different actor number if both are true).  Unfortunately because they're drawn in pairs it changes two characters at a time; I couldn't get it to selectively change a single sprite.  I tried in vain to tweak the C3/6d79 subroutine to only draw one shop actor at a time, but I had no luck; modifying C3/6d79 itself ended in scrambled tiles and repointing the shop to C3/6ce9 (one pose, used by the char select menu) denied me an adequate insertion point for my subroutine.  There might still be some hope there, but I'm struggling to work it out; I think I might need to appropriate an unused ram byte like $1EE0 and make the loop more complex.

As for #2, it was a silly thought that I was going to assign profile $0F to actor $07 temporarily.  I learned that the game does not remember player-entered names, so were I to change $07's name to $0F and then back to $07, I'd either have to invoke another naming screen (which is weird and obtuse) or the player name input would be erased.  Here I was worried that the spell list would get wiped by doing that!  Oh well, I'm still pounding my head on #1 for now, perhaps there's yet hope for the idea.

Regarding #3, I learned that the game by default treats all guests as the same class (if you happen to load two different guest profiles, it uses the last one loaded). If that profile is $0E, then by the arrangement of the data an equippable guest treats the "Spec active if Imp" flag on equipment as their equip-able flag.  Likewise, $0F behaves the same way with the "Heavy Gear" equipment flag (the one the Merit Award enables).  I'm sure Hatzen knew about this when he wrote Guest Adder (which I haven't used or examined but of which I am peripherally aware), but I was invigorated to learn it myself.  At the moment I'm only using the Merit Award flag for four pieces of equipment, so if I were to approach that in another fashion (perhaps moving the "Requires Merit Award" functionality to an unused bit, as I recall you mentioning in a different thread), my presentation could be made more elegant.

Alas, all of this is a big tripping point right as I pull into the last phase of my event editing... perhaps I should put it all off for a version 4.