Most of you are missing the key point here. Most NPC's do not own extremely valuable items and if they did it would be locked away in a hiding place that only the NPC would know and/or careful planning by the PC. Gold and high dollar items would be locked away and guarded at a local bank! With that being said, us thieves need more of a challenge such as bank robbery, robbing caravans, etc...

Love this idea. I never felt the Great Heist was really a heist at all. I'm really looking forward to seeing if we can see into home or thru windows. It svcked to scout out a house, break into the house and then have the owner sitting right in front of you. There was no way to tell when the owner went to bed. Either with a light going out or physically watching them walk up their stairs. Also, I never understood why you'd pick a lock and then that door or chest would be unlocked for the rest of the game.

Oblivion already did respawn items in interior cells, it's just that items taken by the player was an exception. So if an NPC picks food off the table and eats it, it'll be back after three days but not if the player does. So it could just be a matter of deciding what items can be respawned and what can't.

Trying to think of a way that less static items could work outside of containers... Maybe you could put down "table markers", which would be an invisible block that you could put on flat surfaces, then assign them an owner and and item type that's supposed to go there. Then if one of the markers was empty the owner would replace it with another item of the same type, or try to buy one if they don't have any. I dunno; maybe that would eat too much computing power. Or maybe it could work if they only checked it like once a week.

Item sizes might be a problem though. Like if a table is originally setup with muffins and they're replaced with pumpkins there'd be clipping all over the place.

I remember certain item in the small camp near Vilverin (alyeid ruin near start point) would respawn mutton and a bowl nearby where I had taken some.

I think there is some level of item replacement that was in Oblivion.