Lands or Towny?

In mid June 2021, we experimented with the idea of adopting Lands as our anti-grief and land claim system over Towny, what we've been using for 1.16. Lands was purchased and installed on our 1.17 test world. Here's what we learned:

• Lands comes with an impressive and polished inventory-based UI for management with many screens and nearly endless options for making mistakes. This is an improvement over Towny which only comes with an impressive set of text commands for management and nearly endless options for making mistakes.
• The UI polish of Lands includes customizable titles for entering land claims; Towny's are not. This includes colors!
• In Towny, you can only be a member of one and exactly one town. Accessing another's land requires some fiddling around with an obscure friends list command or Embassies, which we weren't really able to figure out how to take advantage of. Lands allows you to both claim multiple areas and join multiple claims. Both systems support ranks with membership, but Lands lets you create your own beyond the defaults.
• There is a Claimblock object in the game which when placed, establishes a claim over that chunk. This is an interesting minecraftian and immersive approach to avoiding needing to use a text command to get started; not everyone will start off by reading the wiki, this allows claims to be organically discovered/used.
• Taxes and upkeep exist in Lands, much like Towny. It is also possible to configure Lands such that you don't lose your land if you can't pay the tax but you can lose your land if you lose the claim, as we already have in Towny.
• A big selling point for us is that you can create sub-areas within a bigger claim and set different permissions on that area. These areas are simple cuboids and can be smaller than a chunk, supporting the creation of public/private spaces within a single claim that aren't 16x16x256.
• Just as in our Towny setup, nations can be created. Nations and towns also have ranks and claim limits based on your group's membership numbers. Combined with multiple claim memberships, its very easy to join a friend's claim to support them with more claim authority.
• Lands includes a way to rent out, sell, and buy plots using signs; in Towny, this requires an extra plugin. This was not tested.
• It appears that QuickShop, our chest shop plugin, supports Lands as well. It can be configured to only allow shops to be created on claims, or to at least require that you have access to the chest in some way. This was also not tested.
• Claim caps can be automatically raised based on playtime. More research into how this affects game balance between players is needed.
• The very basic /lands map command is gorgeous. Towny is indecipherable and symbol-based.
• Claims have their own bank accounts. Further testing needed to see how members can contribute funds or withdraw.
• Integration with BetterRTP for new players to find a random spawn location of their own.
• Lands uses particles to visualize your claims, selections, and sub-areas in the game. *Extremely* useful.

A couple of rough spots:

• No way to outright disable teleportation; must be done by command, and it still offers the player an option to teleport despite it never working. There's a couple of other instances of this happening, especially for anything with a command parallel.
• It is unclear if Lands is supported by lightEconomy, but replacing lightEconomy isn't out of the question. Its support of non-player accounts is extremely limited, possibly only to Towny.
• The claimblock idea is extremely interesting, but raises the question of how to distribute it to players while still costing funds. Possibly build a basic /claimblock command that charges them while a server chest shop lives at spawn?

Overall, a very positive experience. After a bit more digging, we'll have our 1.17 configuration figured out.