Great thoughts ozzie, most of your mentions I realized beeing important while reading and I missed them without precise noticing before you told them. E.g. the lighting by fires, chat-issues (having a channel for a restricted distance for - let's say 50 or 100m). Perhaps via "/l" for local. Well, beeing a dev too I know it's one thing to restrict listening via zone-offsets, and another thing to do it via radius of distance. The latter is not just a 10 row piece of code, especially if standing at borders of regions lol.
If it will be possibly to create structures via resources like logs or metal or grass or whatever will be an essential thing IMHO for people having homes. Terraforming is a nice option to prepare a land - level it - but beeing able to build something out of various things is much greater.
I will not judge prematurely but I expect this beeing implemented having some issues if I look at the current ability to position things like logs, and - as told earlier - what is having collision boxes and what not. Perhaps there should be an option of the context-menu of objects to switch into a move-objects-mode which gives three arrows in red/green/blue which you can drag. That'd be a complete other thing than the actual trial-and-error-way via pickup, step left f.e. and drop.
Cheers.