Korva
I'm not so sure it'd be as simple as a pure lvl boost - what about all the skills that go with the levels, I'd have thought it would be FAR more time consuming to do it on a 1-1 request basis than a database merge... I still think they must be lacking the database know-how, maybe they made their main DBA's and designers redundant a while back in order to save money and just kept people with enough knowledge to keep the existing databases maintained
"Database" is kind of a ubiquitous term. Many people assume that it refers to something like a MySQL database or some other SQL variant. While Ryzom does use a SQL database it is only used for player accounting, shard administration and some of the WebIG apps (such as mail and forum...)
The game itself has its own "database" called a "Persistent Database" which is essentially a serialized tree of world objects. There are no tables or queries - this is essentially a raw representation of the running innards of the shard. I think this is where the technical difficulties lie. I took a look at the code to see for myself and even the existing tools really only assist in generating files for individuals to do this manually. The entire effort, as far as I can tell, is basically a manual process.
So between the technical complexity of manually altering thousands of binary files, mitigating conflicts between three shards, and then actually performing the file moves... there's the expertise on how to do it and the man-power to actually accomplish it.
Guessing - but this is probably the problem.