Actually if you make the tinker chests just to get you over the hump (2.0) then you should be good to go.
I remember doing the exact same thing on EA now that we're talking. There was that hump so I found some stacks of practice chests from players to get going. The escort quests have a relatively short timer and there's around 700-900 gold per. That's actually how I funded my startup there.
I'd love to turbocharge treasure hunting on Rebirth too. I've just never done much of it. I might start a Thunter just to play around.
I'm with you on the Escort quests on Prod shards, New Haven escorts give you 500gp and it takes just a few seconds to run them to where they are going right in town with a short delay between. The New Haven quests aren't around on Rebirth though. I did run into one looking for an escort to another town, Jhelom maybe, last night but I had 40 Magery with no runes on that character.
On the Treasure Hunting, I ended up finding my mapper on my original Rebirth account from a few months ago which already has 100 LP. If you ever need any T-Hunter input, testing, etc on Rebirth I'm happy to jump in. I've been building them and playing them since I first started playing UO, including my first one done 100% by hand on Atlantic (ugh), and I would love to help out making things work better on Rebirth (if applicable).
One thing I noticed when testing the Vesper chests, I'm getting almost no armor/weapons/jewelry and those that I have gotten have zero mods on them. Is that intentional just to make things harder or just something to look at fixing sometime? I haven't gone around to all the usual spawning chest stomping grounds (Destard, Trinsic, Yew Crypts, etc,etc) yet to check out those 3's and 4's.