Oh yes, definitely, I did that for Ys IV, max exp and gold, those are easy even for me to accomplish with the state file. Yeah, flying through the game will help in the 2nd/3rd pass editing to check everything, fix context issues, etc.
Turning off random battles would be something much trickier though, tracking game code logic down, but if elmer is ever bored and available, maybe we could ask help with that at some point.
I think we will be OK on spacing, the text block I worked with and was worried about David said was the biggest, but a few simple things like not subsequently repeating the character name (as you do for Xanadu) did the trick to get it inserted! That's actually the one text block showcased in the screenshots as I didn't insert anything else, so everything you already wrote fit (no truncating, just not repeating character names unnecessarily)! The LZ compression is David's best version and he didn't see anymore possible improvements, so we'll see how it goes after I cross that bridge and review/insert the 60% work you already did.