Final Fantasy Hacktics

I was using patcher to set up a personal arena edit and when I gave Samurai Stasis Sword, the AI refuses to use it. The enemy is not absorb/weaken Holy (which the BMG says will cause the AI to not use Holy Sword abilities). It is the highest damage ability (and in fact the only ability learned) that character has. It's equipped via a secondary, so it's not the issue where having no secondary equipped prevents a character from using abilities of its primary job (it's an 8 year old 1.3 arena ROM I started with).

My first attempts to fix it involved unchecking "requires sword" in case that got repurposed for something else in arena. After that, I verified "AI Uses" and the various AI flag checkboxes were correct. They were. I double checked that the unit was actually wielding a sword (and a knight sword. Tried both). Once none of that worked, I downloaded the most recent Arena ppf from here and applied my patcher .fftpatch on top of that. Ignoring the many text and spriting issues that created, the unit still refused to use the skills (which I verified were still learned). Then I remembered that Draw Out is hardcoded like Charge and Throw are.

I've already done several relatively simple asm patches on my base tournament ROM (chests no longer drop, only crystals; some formula edits; orgASM prepackaged "can give negative stats to equipment"), so I understand what I'm doing at least to that level, and I already wrote a python script to take in blocks of hex and convert it to the asm commands so I can at least read what commands are being processed if the wiki doesn't have that area mapped. I know that some skills like Jump and Math have been forcibly unhardcoded, so the process to do that has to be known. Where can I find some info to help me out with this?

As the title says, I'm working on a patching tool similar to FFTPatcher. I want to rip the edited ability/job/item names from the ROM and use them inline instead of the vanilla names. This is especially important as the base ROM I'm working with is the FFT 1.3 Arena ROM, so a *ton* of things have been renamed/changed, often to entirely unrelated things. I've had very little trouble finding the data tables for everything I care about having in the patcher (your wiki is excellent for this. thanks for that), and have successfully done proof-of-concept edits for all of them using only my little Python script.

The problem arises when I try to get the text data out. As I understand it, it is stored in several places across the disk, and is compressed in some way (or so Tactext's About tells me). I have no idea where to start finding this information out, short of asking Xifanie for the locations (given Tactext says she was the one who gave them the locations in the first place). The page linked in Tactext's about references the person who taught the author about the text compression, but that site gives me a 403 FORBIDDEN error, so I've hit a dead end there, too. I tried to search for the forum post where Tactext was discussed and initially built, but given how commonly used a tool it is, filtering through to find that proved to be beyond my search skills.

I am entirely willing to learn whatever skills I need to to accomplish this goal. I have a pretty strong grasp of coding as a whole and at least rudimentary knowledge of asm. I appreciate any assistance any of y'all can give me.