20 years ago, Neira having completed the tile matrix, I was working on the town and base (including carrier groups) layout for "Carrier Air War" (central pacific 1944-45) scenario.
I know you're neck deep in the Balkans scenario but this is a scenario I'd love to develop fully, too. Lots of "crossover" stuff from SPAW would mean not starting from scratch.
In the years after 2004, we worked up the base/carrier and town layout (airfields/target.dat) and did some prelim work on individual area layout (tardata.dat). We also had a prelim aircraft set and screens.
For finishing it need a proper tardata layout, and sorting out the carrier/ship mods. And a new up to date aircraft set.
If it was me doing this project I'd start with the target set from SPAW.
Moving the targets with the editor is a piece of cake, then after moving them, give them geographically accurate names. In fact, the static fleets and convoys built into the set wouldn't need any adjustments at all except some of the capital ship names would need to be changed for historical purposes.
Once that's done it's fairly easy to edit the TMODS at each location so that there's a "newness" to what the players experience and so that we don't have some TMODS sitting in the wrong place at the target ( Stuff like machine gun nest in 20 feet of water)
You'd also have incidental changes like squadron names that would need to be edited for historical accuracy.
FWIW, it took the combined effort of the four members of the ModSquad year to produce the original SPAW and yet it took me alone only about 4-6 months to update the target set for SPAW Final Cut.
I'm going to be pretty well wholly immersed in the Italy/Balkans/Ukraine world for a while yet. However, I can send you over the most complete setup I have for CAW, and you can see what you make of it.
It was where the idea for catapault aircraft began
I've uploaded a 1.05 GB zip to your folder. This contains 1.6 versions of all three of my Asia-Pacific theatres including CAW, Midway and China.
I've kept this bundle together because the version of 1.6 is not the most up to date, and the theatres are essentially quick conversions from 1.29 - they use their own aircraft inventories.