Maybe we could do something similar to the standard and extended versions, like NHF and NHF_E? The first would only contain balance adjustments for Multiplayer, while the second would include everything else. This way, we could accept practically any artifact ;)
Also, the same principle could be applied to NCF.
And NCF, in theory, can be expanded to 65535; 1000 is probably an artificial limitation. Or the game doesn't read more than a three-digit number, which is doubtful and very strange.
People will still want to see a lot of things, even imbalanced ones, in single-player, but in Multiplayer, it will be problematic.