I know the most baaaasic at least from my understanding back in the day was XTBL and table editing, I didn't make a lot of headway, but it seems like TFE_Pad files are the replacement for the old XTBL format for the tables. I got a few to partly open in Notepad+ and for general formatting seems the same but it doesn't quite unpack right.
I'm unsure if this would be much of a start, would we be able to drop modified TFE_Pads in the root directory, would we need to repack them in VPP_PC files again? This is all a little outside my wheelhouse, but for things like adding back in cut weapons or clothing that might be floating around in the files, this comes off as a possibility?