Ah, I think you may have misunderstood my post there.
I was responding to DisFanJen's posts and thoughts on building mechanics from the books, instead of starting from the original material.
This is why I said that I was approaching from the perspective of throwing out the progressions from the original material.
Yes, I do own the d20 RPG book, I've run some games with it back in the day. I was specifically going from the opposite direction, where I'm pulling from the description of the novels first, and building mechanics from that (ignoring the existing book).
So most of my thoughts you've responded to were ideas approached without the existing d20 book in mind on purpose.
Sorry for any confusion on that, I was going on somewhat of a tangent to your original thread purpose here.