Agreed. MOM had tons of balance issues, bugs and AI weaknesses, and the magic items were probably one of them. Another advantage of Dominions items not being free-form-creatable (besides balance issues) is that they are well-chosen in interesting and appropriate ways that make sense have have a history (or comedy, or mystery) to them. It was sort of fun in MOM to be able to put the same spell on every picture, but it also detracted from the meaningfulness of the images, since they generally meant next to nothing - an impressive-looking item could do nothing impressive and/or nothing related to what it looked like, or could look the same as a completely different item, even though they both looked unique, etc.
Anyway, modding items would be great. The current items are very diverse and well done, but more are of course always welcome, assuming they're carefully made and balanced, like the existing ones.
As for nation-specific items, they are nice, and would be fun to be able to mod in new ones. Ermor has a laurel (which for some reason, other nations can make but not use?), and Mictlan has a jade knife, but I think that's available to others as well.
I was thinking it'd be interesting to mod in some more national items, even if just generic ones like giving everyone Versions of the magic trinket and armor items that match their national equipment and/or theme - magic spathas, pikes, greco helmets and round shields for Arco, magic obsidian swords for Mictlan, etc etc etc, all pretty tame and based on the existing items and existing difference in generic items.
Not that I've got around to using anywhere near all of the existing items...
PvK