Please don't interpret me as suggesting that the tracking properties are bad or unnecessary. Adding them is useful. I'm merely saying that currently if you tell mafia to cast any limited skill which is not tracked in properties 1,000,000 individual times, that's 1,000,000 server hits telling you that you're out of casts.
With the all-purpose tracking I suggest, even for skills freshly added to mafia's data files, it would be only 1 server hit per session for mafia to know you've reached the limit. Proper, property-based tracking can then be added later if it's deemed important, but in the meantime simply adding a little number -- the daily limit-- into the data file would be enough to save server hits.
IDEA: a single _property containing all daily skills use. If this is too much information for a single property to hold, skills without limits could be omitted, being tracked purely during your session. It could be formatted as JSON or however is convenient for mafia itself, indexing skills by integer rather than string, whatever. Making the property easy to understand/parse is not a concern since all of the information would be available in proxy records.
Previous tracking properties could be
1) left in. They would work in addition to the new property.
2) omitted from prefs but internally hardcoded to point to the new property's information so as to remain backwards-compatible but hopefully point future scripters in the right direction.
3) completely removed. This would break some scripts -- but would reduce preference bloat, as well as get rid of some of the daily properties which lack an underscore, thus also reducing the recurring questions about why some daily properties have underscores and some don't.
4) phased out gradually using any progression of the above.
I think this is a forward-thinking solution to skills tracking, since it can accept a new skill easily without anything special needing to be coded into mafia for it, or any new properties added. Thoughts, anyone?
tl,dr: Roippi, maybe you ought to hold off on adding lots of new properties just yet.