The problem is you've got a good dev team again

A clean wipe is easiest by far. That's 5 minutes, move the vault and a few TRUNCATE commands to the database. Keeping info for doing anything would be time-consuming. Several hours of work plus a lot of testing...time that could be spent on other things.
Prime has about 20k player characters weighing in at about 1.2GB. There's a lot of database on that (probably a few hundred columns per player), but that's why we use MySQL in the first place: it can handle lots of data and spit out what you want quickly. That's not a reason to wipe on it's own.
In general we take player feelings into account when doing things, but we've done wildly unpopular things before too (nerf those clerics into the Stone Age
