Hmm, I may not be conveying what I mean then. If the character currently has it...they keep it and stay playable.
If you want it for another...yeah, a repurchase might be necessary, or "This exists on this character, unlock for this account" could work, for things like ATs and power sets. IE...you have a Peacebringer, the account is flagging as Peacebringer being unlocked, etc.
I'm the first to admit that I simply don't know as much about the guts of the game as you, and you'd have a much better idea of what's possible.
There may not be any perfect solutions, but I'm thinking of what I've seen in other MMOs that worked, and was wildly popular with the player base, and generally got money forked over cheerfully rather the grudgingly.
I like that solution--assuming character data ports over but account data doesn't, you should in theory be able to datamine a person's characters to determine their account purchases. "Oh, you've got a level 21 Mastermind! That means that the Mastermind archetype should be unlocked for this account! Oh, you've got a Water Blast Defender! That means that Water Blast should be unlocked for this account! Oh, you've got boxing gloves on! That means the Boxing costume parts should be unlocked for this account!" It would have its drawbacks--things you bought but never got around to using would need to be repurchased--but it's not without its charms as a solution.
However, it'd require datamining and possibly developing a tool to do the datamining (as they might not have something that does that in the game now), which gets back to time and money and expertise. This would be time and money spent by the new crew, not NCSoft, which makes it a bit more viable--they do have an incentive to get a large, happy returning playerbase, after all--but from what we've heard about CoH code, it may be beyond their expertise...at least at relaunch. That might be something they get to later if they can.
(I should make a sig stating that all my statements in this thread are my interpretations of things more knowledgeable people have said, and I reserve the right to be totally wrong.)
