I am not familiar with the system - but here's nevertheless a thought:
afaik, there are module-based limitations to the number of items that can be in it. In part, this seems to lead to a situation where there exist a certain limited number of reagents that people know will be useful. In a limitless world, there might be many more highly specific reagents or variations of reagents - and the vast majority of them might be completely useless except for a very specific purpose.
But would there, perhaps, be ways around the module-limitations in some (or all?) cases? E.g., I recall that the dye-system used to color clothes etc., used to use many more items - and then was replaced by a script. Let's say, then, one was looking for a very specific kind of mistletoe, vine, etc., harvested on a specific daytime, etc. in a particular place. Could a script handle that and create an item with an auto-modified name or description that includes this kind of complex information about it?
Then, it might be useful to explore and find out that e.g., a particular patch of strange mistletoe grows at place X - but unless one already had a very specific idea or instruction on what was needed, it would be rather useless to try to collect 999 different samples of mistletoe on the chance, that, perhaps, the one that was needed happened to be included.
If this is technically feasible, one might also apply it to other items like pelts or horns, etc.. I might need to have a specific gender, age, sibling rank (e.g., firstborn cub etc.), color-shade, length etc. which might be a (bounded) random number associated with something that isn't actually very rare to find as such.