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[Jack7]

No. I'm thinking about a fluff-oriented, qualitative way.

When you are Sigfried, and you only ever fight one or two dragons in your entire life, sure, the dragon is uncanny. But if you fight a dozen monsters a week, they're all going to blur together. Why is one of them uncanny, and another not. They both have weird powers beyond mortal ken, right? So why is one special? Did it happen touch the Great McGuffin Crystal, or something?

I don't require this be quantitative and game-oriented. I just require that it make some sort of sense in the game world.

Well, I think I'd leave that up to whoever is designing their world and game. Most worlds for instance have monsters and economic systems for instance, but the game rules don't tell you exactly how you must structure them. That's up to the individual game to decide. How you make sense of something, like the money system for instance, will depend on how the world is structured.

Pillaging corpses for alchemical ingredients is a time honored D&D tradition as well as a common trope of fantasy literature.

I think you have to be careful of several things:

1) Don't make every monster a walking potion. It's not so bad if the guy with some alchemy skill, a few herbs, and the brew potion feat can turn every corpse into a potion (in fact, that's kinda cool IMO), but if you don't need any skill to do it and the effects go beyond those of ordinary potions things can get out of hand in a hurry.
2) Don't leave the value of a corpse undefined and vague. Understand that if corpses become treasure, you need some idea of what you are actually handing out or else its quickly going to invalidate assumptions about PC wealth. For my part, I'd be more interested in a table that simply said, "Choice alchemical body parts and regeants, weight and value" and listed that for each relevant monster, so that I'd know that X lbs. of Manticore body parts was worth Y g.p. After that, a list of which potions corresponded to which monster body parts would be hand, that is just what can you make out of this stuff if you find yourself wanting to make a potion on the cheap.
3) Don't forget just how many monsters are out there. Don't make body part collection so important to the game that everyone is hauling around a couple hundred pounds of dissected corpses and embalming equipment. The system is supposed to be fun, and not a burden.
4) The general idea of a curse (or possibly positive effect) resulting from the death of a monster is a good one, but if you aren't careful its going to be a very unfun one. If every time you kill a monster, it results in a powerful curse, its just going to feel like the DM screwing the players after a while. In D&D, I think you have to make some distinction between 'ordinary' monsters, and 'monsters of Legend'. It's really those 'monsters of Legend', the ones that you've taken the trouble to name, give some history to, and perhaps even give a personality to that ought to be numinous, mysterious, and for which the PC's will accept that the death of the monster of legend is an epic event. The death of some lesser monster need not be accompanied by any great fanfare.

I wouldn't necessarily argue with any of that. Like so much in RPGs I'd leave the details to be worked out by the DM, GM, or game participants.

Of course when I made the thread the idea of monsters being far more truly dangerous was what I was shooting at. The idea of "monster taxidermy" hadn't even really entered my mind. Not as it seems to have been thought of here, more like a modern industrial exercise or occupation.

But of course other people will think of all kinds of things you didn't when you mention something. Some good, some bad, some just plain different than what you were thinking of.