Fiann of the Silver Hand

Aiming for popularity is why Katy Perry is "successful".

If you ask me, the Override level should always be left empty.

Long have I thought this, especially for temporary conditions applied by spells (or AREs, or quests, or anything).  Bioware didn't optimize script slots because they didnt have to, and now we have nearly 2 decades of mods dependent upon that inefficiency.  This is why no one bothers fixing plot holes, or introducing a better combat system, because someone's 10+ year-old mod might get broken.

Maybe this partially undoes what you've got so far, but since you like brainstorming

On death, a CRE's script does a few things:

1.  makes dead/orig CRE (C1) invisible/no corpse, but still drops loot including equipped items

2.  spawns a new CRE (C2) that is, in fact, the same CRE file

 2a.  C2 is forced to only used the downed/dead animation

 2b.  C2 can take X amount of damage before its script "kills" it again, this time chunk-style

 2c.  C2 is immune to most spells;  damage, resurrection, and create undead are exception categories

etc

There'd need to be a way to properly duplicate the dead CRE, then copy its scripts to the new CRE.  Slightly different mechanism for scripts depending on if the CRE is brought back to independent life, or as a controlled undead.

etc

Real attacks seems like just reinforcing that BG is a hybrid RTwP game, adding a drop of "realism" into a bucket of abstract representation.

Neat.

It's really too bad about the equipment getting dropped on death.  I guess that was Bioware's substitute for actually carrying a dead party NPC.