I have decided that unfortunately this server is not for me. I wish you all the best in your various endeavors and nothing but the best of success to optic and the server. There are just a few things the youth of the community do here which I simply can't condone. That coupled with some of the contents of some of the postings on this forum have made me change my mind about being part of this community. Respect has always been earned, never given freely, whether earned by age, experience, or formal training. Mental filters and self moderation are wonderful skills, and should be excised liberally, once something is said, it is often too late to take it back. Always remember the impressions you leave with people last a lifetime, if you want people to think their best you should always put your best foot forward.

That said I don't expect anything said on the internet to be well received or understood. In fact I half expect the offenders to simply skim over this. On top of that it will probably be misconstrued by those it was NOT meant for. Regardless...

Pax Vobis (Peace to you),
The Most Reverend DeVil Cardinal DeMonde

I'm not sure what's desired exactly for the devs/host/ops but I have noticed an outcry among players for protection of their builds, bases, and homes.
On the boards here I saw a request for secure trading.

What I can do is tell you what was running on my test server and what I know works as well as what was running on MCSteamed.
As well as other methods we've used to help make the server successful. (Our downfall was immature staff.)

Of course we ran everything through bukkit. Sometimes this broke more than it fixed, but more often than not that simply wasn't the case.
Some I see you have already (like Bukkit).
BigBrother We used this one for block edit history. Outdated for the time being and i see the author suggest logblock which you use.
BlastControl We used this for greater and easily changeable Creeper and TNT customization.
CreatureBox Everwish your staff could move spawners or create spawners that gave more than pigs? This is the toy.
General We used this for all the God and all the other goodies that were staff perks.
Help yeah that one is pretty much self explanitory.
Permissions we used it because it worked and PermissionsEx wasn't out yet.
HeriocDeath We had it, you have it, I still love it.
iChat we used it for all those lovely titles and text color it worked.
iConomy we used this for our comprehensive in game economy which I'll explain in a bit.
LWC we used it, you use it, it works, enough said.
MyHome had great housing commands.
MyWarp, you have it so you can obviously see some of the great qualities.
Residence when coupled with worldedit, worldguard, iconomy, and permissions, it shines as the best way for players to be able to protect their own land from sky to bedrock, if they have the money.
SignShop and this was the meat and potatoes of the economy, players were able to buy and sell to each other, and for those really rare items pay the server (bank) if they had enough money to get them.
We were still playing with IRC but I'm pretty sure it was heroicchat YLT was implementing.

Yeah that's pretty much the meat and taters of the whole thing.
Ranks were as follows.
Default were those that were logged in either registered or unregistered (though if we could auto rank like you suggest with opticraft I'd have done guests that changed to default on register)
Builders were players that were known, and didn't grief.
Trusted were builders who went above and beyond to help the community as well (with this rank came the ability to place public warp points)
Donors got their own special rank regardless of money donated, as well as other little perks such as the ability to teleport via world edit commands and protect their homes for free.
Mods were helpful players that used to be trusted but were granted staff features to keep an eye on the server and ban players if need be. Bans by a mod always had to be extremely well justified and documented.
Admins were responsible for checking over the previously mentioned bans, and making sure the server was running, they were our ops.
Host were those in charge of the hardware.

Everybody's rank displayed via iChat in game so there was no question about who had what ability.
New players started with $30 and that was it. In order to gain more they had to either sell items, or hold onto their money and earn interest. Interest was earned for every 30 minutes active in the game world at a rate of 5%. Profits from interest were made slowly but for the thrifty compounded quickly but prices were usually set accordingly.

Feel free to ask me for more details on anything.