Cleaning up Hommlet?

I watched almost an hour of videos last night about DM experiences with the Village of Hommlet.   Partly to refresh my memory, and also because of how interesting it is to me that some of these little booklets hold so many memories for so many people.  Since that was the first real "home base" village in RPG history and it was the starting point for the big Temple of Elemental Evil series, it is certainly an iconic location in fantasy gaming history. It is now considered to be located in the Greyhawk campaign setting.

This video was all about how a DM should prepare to run the module, and the host showed a ton of content he posted on World Anvil to get all the information just one click away, including an extra illustration of the Inn he commissioned, and hand-outs of the actual menu.  I guess we do have to optimize the content a bit, and there are a variety of sites and tools to help do it.  It's funny how the map has all the buildings nicely numbered, and the book organizes all the descriptions in order, but it's still apparently not that easy to find the information needed in a pinch.  Sure, you can look up a house quickly, but having a separate list of just the NPCs who might be able to help the players sounds like a good idea.  Knowing where every window is in the Inn sounds like way more detail than anyone would need, but I know how players are, always getting into trouble and looking for more trouble, so I suppose you could have some theieves or assassins come in through one of those windows to get them.

The other video featured two of the guys from Goodman Games who put together those amazing tribute/conversion books for the classic modules.  They talked about the major imbalances in the module and how they kept to the original sources and did not try to fix them for their 5e conversion.  They mentioned trying to clean up the Gate House and use it as a base, and that gave me all kinds of ideas for things my set of PCs could do next.  However, after reading the PDF of the module again, the amount of offal and horrific filth down in those lower levels is daunting.  I could see a group of players driving their GM nuts by staying there and cleaning it all and repairing the gate and roof, and doing everything except adventuring.  It would be a good boost to the town's economy, but it would also upset the balance of power, and the module has hints that such actions would result in a level 10 assassin showing up a week later to take out the do-gooders.  

And here is the Greyhawk Grognard with a video talking about how to handle that assassin in the most dramatic, sneaky way...

Maybe Anne would be interested in a session of just renovations?  It could be an alternate world where the evil is in the past or future and the village is less of a hot spot.  I am tempted to run it solo one night, just to work out what it would take to fix it all up and use that as a base for my team, instead of renting houses like normal people do.  I am used to playing sandbox games, and campaign settings are meant to be sandboxes, but it's a bit artificial to ignore the overall politics or history of what is presented.  Or does it not matter and I can do whatever I find enjoyable?